Summer is the best season for a great read to take with you on the beach or on vacation...or if you're like me...anywhere!! I was chosen by 20SB and Random House once again to review another book, Lucky Us by Amy Bloom. You can visit her official website here. The book's official release is July 29th!
The following is a summary you can find on Amy Bloom's website:
“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.
The book hooks you from the very first page by jumping into the plot very quickly. Bloom captures the 1940's Hollywood and war era very well as Iris jump starts her acting career and her half-sister Eva observes it all on the sidelines. The structure of the novel was very interesting as random letters were written in between chapters from the key characters that either foreshadowed what was going to happen next or to deliver a different point-of-view other than through Eva's. The overall plot kept me reading more as Eva and Iris were although living together, had different demons to face as they ventured through life and taking risks.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a great, quick read that takes you back to a completely different era and through a family's struggle to survive.
