Amy Bloom. (2014). Lucky Us: A Novel. Unabridged Books on Tape.

Amy Bloom. 2014. Lucky Us: A Novel. Books on Tape.

Amy Bloom, Lucky Us: A Novel. Books on Tape, 2014.

Amy Bloom. Lucky Us: A Novel. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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   • bioText: Amy Bloom is the author of the bestselling and acclaimed Away; Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; and Normal.
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title

Lucky Us

fullDescription

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”
So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.
 
Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.
 
With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.
Praise for Lucky Us
“Lucky Us is a remarkable accomplishment. One waits a long time for a novel of this scope and dimension, replete with surgically drawn characters, a mix of comedy and tragedy that borders on the miraculous, and sentences that should be in a sentence museum. Amy Bloom is a treasure.”—Michael Cunningham
“Exquisite . . . a short, vibrant book about all kinds of people creating all kinds of serial, improvisatory lives.”—The New York Times
 
“Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.”—The Washington Post
 
“Bloom’s crisp, delicious prose gives [Lucky Us] the feel of sprawling, brawling life itself. . . . Lucky Us is a sister act, which means a double dose of sauce and naughtiness from the brilliant Amy Bloom.”—The Oregonian
 
“A tasty summer read that will leave you smiling . . . Broken hearts [are] held together by lipstick, wisecracks and the enduring love of sisters.”—USA Today
 
“Exquisitely imagined . . . [a] grand adventure.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Marvelous picaresque entertainment . . . a festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline Mozartean clarity of vision.”—Elle

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Cunningham
   • content: "Lucky Us is a remarkable accomplishment. One waits a long time for a novel of this scope and dimension, replete with surgically drawn characters, a mix of comedy and tragedy that borders on the miraculous, and sentences that should be in a sentence museum. Amy Bloom is a treasure."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Oregonian
   • content: "These two things about Amy Bloom's surprise-filled Lucky Us are indisputable: It opens with a terrific hook and closes with an image of exquisite resolution. . . . She writes sharp, sparsely beautiful scenes that excitingly defy expectation, and part of the pleasure of reading her is simply keeping up with her. You won't know where Lucky Us is headed until, suddenly, it's there. . . . The book's opening lines, destined to be quoted in many a classroom for their perfection, are: 'My father's wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.' . . . [It's] a short, vibrant book about all kinds of people creating all kinds of serial, improvisatory lives. Changes occur because characters fall in and out of love, trouble and, yes, luck. And even when the bad luck is devastating, they dust themselves off and inventively move on."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
     
     "Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . [a] high-octane tale of two half-sisters who take it upon themselves to reverse their sorry, motherless fortunes . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity. . . . Love will fizz and fizzle, outrageous lies will be told, orphans will find happiness and heartbreak, and fate will sweep in to drive characters into hellish corners of the world. . . . There are few American novelists writing today who can spin a yarn as winningly. . . . Welcome to America, dear reader. Lucky us."--The Washington Post
     
     "Bloom's crisp, delicious prose gives [Lucky Us] the feel of sprawling, brawling life itself. . . . Lucky Us is a sister act, which means a double dose of sauce and naughtiness from the brilliant Amy Bloom."
3. • premium: False
   • source: O: The Oprah Magazine
   • content: "A tasty summer read that will leave you smiling . . . Lucky Us is about Bloom's uncanny ability to conjure the tone of the war years--broken hearts held together by lipstick, wisecracks and the enduring love of sisters, come what may."--USA Today
     
     "Exquisitely imagined . . . [a] grand adventure."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "Marvelous picaresque entertainment . . . Our heroines' prospects darken, brighten, and darken again with every turn of Bloom's cosmic kaleidoscope. Parades of finely drawn characters--a Spanish makeup artist, a black jazz singer afflicted with vitiligo, a lovely Italian nouveau riche family in Great Neck, New York, a soulful German mechanic--enter and leave the scene. . . . To read Bloom's fiction is to experience afresh how life is ruled by chance and composed of spare parts that are purposed and repurposed in uncanny ways--it's a festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline Mozartean clarity of vision."--Elle
     
     "A fireworks display of delightful, if sometimes confounding, surprises . . . wildly twisting . . . spryly spontaneous."--The Wall Street Journal
     
     "[Bloom] writes with such spare, efficient grace. . . . Her words are carefully chosen to cut clean and deep. . . . Even [her] casual asides stack up, like pearls strung on a wire. . . . Taken together, they make this odd, precocious girl's story feel as big and small and strangely marvelous as life itself. [Grade] A-"
5. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
     
   • content: "
     "This coming-of-age story begs for a string of exuberant adjectives: heartbreaking, triumphant, lush and sparkling. . . . The book is fanciful but deep, the world is flawed but beautiful, and Eva can never decide betw
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 29, 2014
     In Bloom’s imaginative romp set in 1939, 11-year-old Eva meets Iris, the older half-sister she never knew she had, after being abandoned by her mother and left on her father’s doorstep in Ohio. Colorful events ensue: Iris runs away to Hollywood with Eva to start a movie career, only to be blackballed over a scandalous lesbian affair; the sisters and their father become servants in the home of a Long Island family; Iris sets her romantic sights on the family’s cook, Reenie, first scheming to have Reenie’s husband arrested as a German spy and then kidnapping an
     orphan because Reenie wants a child. The book is written from Eva’s point of view in a simple, matter-of-fact style, describing the events without emotion. Packard’s narration is tailored to Bloom’s under-
     stated writing style: she reads in a cool, neutral voice that perfectly matches the
     author’s tone. But this type of performance turns out to be detrimental to story in the audio edition, creating distance rather than engagement between listeners and the vibrant plot. Instead of an intimate listening experience that draws listeners in, it holds them at arms’ length, making it difficult to empathize even when tragedy hits. A Random House hardcover.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from May 12, 2014
     Two teenaged half-sisters make their way through WWII-era America in Bloom’s imaginative romp. After being left on her father’s Ohio doorstep by her absconding mother, 11-year-old Eva meets Iris, the older half-sister she never knew she had. They escape to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to become a movie star. But they wind up on Long Island, where the girls and their father, Edgar, find employment in the home of the nouveau riche Torelli family. Over the course of the story, Edgar develops a relationship with a black jazz singer named Clara Williams, Iris falls in love with the Torellis’ cook, Reenie Heitmann, and Eva learns to read the tarot and sets herself up as a psychic. Joining the lively cast is Francisco Diego, a Hollywood makeup artist; Gus, Reenie’s German husband, who is deported; and Danny, an orphan who is ultimately raised by Eva. On the way to a gloriously satisfying ending, these characters are separated by fate and distance, but form a vividly rendered patchwork American family (straight, gay, white, black, citizen, immigrant). Bloom (Away) transforms history to create a story of stunning invention, with characters that readers will feel lucky to encounter.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”
So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.
 
Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.
 
With their friends in high and low...

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