Lucky Us comes out tomorrow and it’s quite
simply wonderful. Lucky readers, you’re
in for a treat: Lucky Us is incandescent
and eerily beautiful as well as quirky and witty. You know you have a winner
when you find a book that grabs you with the opening sentence:
“My father’s
wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might
be in it for us.”
With that thought, 11-year-old Eva’s mother abandons
her on the doorstep of her absent father’s home where she’s tossed in with her
beautiful actress half-sister, 16-year-old Iris, and their negligent father. The girls run away to California where Iris
acts in movies until “ruined” by an affair with a famous actress who abandons
her when revealing their love threatens her career. Meanwhile Eva transforms
herself like a displaced person to become all that everyone in her upside-down
life needs. Taking place from 1939 to 1948, Lucky
Us shows how family is much more than genetics especially in war time when
resilience is the only thing that really matters.
In Lucky Us the plot is credible and engaging but it’s the rich
characters that will capture you and make you cancel plans to stay in their
lives. A road trip as memorable as that
of Thelma and Louise sets the scene for the emerging importance of each
character and Eva’s role in each of their lives. And like the best road trips, the reader isn’t
ever entirely sure where it will ultimately end until the last ah-hah. Shocks and surprises abound and it would be a
detriment to readers to reveal any of them. Lucky
Us is packed with events that don’t always seem lucky when they occur but
the resilient characters still “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
Lucky Us
also serves up an unexpected bonus in that each chapter is named with a jazz
title from the era. These set the period
mood and put the reader in the movie sets, automobiles, and wartime beauty
parlors where the novel’s action takes place. Bloom’s website provides links to listen to
the chapter openers and going back to reread parts of the novel after listening
to the music is like getting extra hot fudge on an already delicious sundae.
Bloom offers the titles as presents saying “For me, chapter titles, like short story
titles, are both gifts to the reader, a little extra, and prisms through which
the chapter can be both previewed and reviewed.
If you know the song, you can hear it playing, faintly in your
head. And if you don’t, you haven’t
missed out – the words themselves still evoke and invite. They can’t take that away from me. Spring will be a little late this year . . .”
Whether you choose to listen to the music as you
read or after, the songs will delight you as would a thirteenth doughnut put in
your hand by a kindly baker.
Summing it Up: You’ll feel like you’re sitting at a
1940s soda fountain counter sipping a creamy milkshake surrounded by characters
whose adventures you want to join when you read this captivating novel. But when you climb down from the stool and
head home, the characters, the sweetness of redemption, and the brilliant
sentences will enter your soul.
Rating: 5 stars
Category: Fiction, Gourmet, Pigeon Pie (Historical Fiction), Book Club
Publication date: July 29, 2014
Author’s Website: http://amybloom.com/
Interview with the Author: http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/62862-training-for-writing-pw-talks-with-amy-bloom.html
What Others are Saying:
New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/books/lucky-us-by-amy-bloom-a-tale-of-the-1940s.html?_r=0
Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4000-6724-4
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