Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

    • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Lucky Us: A Novel
    Lucky Us: A Novel
    Lucky Us: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    Lucky Us: A Novel

    Written by Amy Bloom

    Narrated by Alicyn Packard

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9780804191357
    Author

    Amy Bloom

    Amy Bloom is the author of a novel, Love Invents Us, and two collections of stories: Come to Me, nominated for a National Book Award, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly , Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

    More audiobooks from Amy Bloom

    Related to Lucky Us

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for Lucky Us

    3.5/5

    333 ratings67 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5

      Jan 28, 2025

      Lucky Us takes place during the 1940's, a time of turbulence in American history. It begins when 12-year-old Eva is left by her mother at her father's home following the death of his wife. Living with her father is her half-sister, Iris, older and determined to become famous in Hollywood, which is where the sisters head before Eva graduates from high school.

      There follows a long list of people in their lives, and some curious situations. There are stories told in epistolary form, some in third person and others in first person. One man is sent to a detention camp for those suspected of being German spies based on a phone call made by Iris, who wanted to begin an affair with his wife. His story evolves into a bizarre set of circumstances written by him to Eva. There are other odd story lines that seemed unlikely.

      This is an unusual coming of age story that missed the mark for me. It began in a promising way but transitioned into confusion.
    • 3/5

      Jan 10, 2022

      Sweet, interesting and fun. An easy weekend read with a historical backdrop. The characters never get completely fleshed out, but it kept me engaged.
    • 2/5

      Apr 30, 2020

      Started out ok, then got really slow and boring. I had a difficult time paying attention to the narrator quite a bit. It got a little interesting when they went and STOLE A CHILD from the orphanage ( I mean - who does this...?????), and then it got boring again very quickly. Then the fire happened and it was interesting for another chapter or so. By the end, I was begging for it to finish.
      2.5 stars, and not recommend unless you would like something to help you sleep at night.
    • 3/5

      Sep 2, 2018

      Thanks to Net Galley for the opportunity to read this.

      I enjoyed the beginning of this book. It started out in a beautiful historic tone. It seemed that the story got stranger and stranger as it went on. The characters were wonderful and pretty realistic.
    • 4/5

      Sep 15, 2017

      When Eva was 11, her mother deposited Eva with her father and left. For the first time, she met her sister Iris, and really got to know her father. When Iris turned 18, they left Ohio and went to Hollywood so that Iris could be a star. That was only the beginning of the places Iris led Eva to.
    • 2/5

      Jul 9, 2017

      I was pretty disappointed by this book. I heard a fantastic radio interview with Amy Bloom, and I was really looking forward to the book, especially after hearing her read the beginning of the chapter in which Iris turns Gus in to the FBI (to get him out of the way because she's in love with his wife). I dove right into the book, and was immediately caught up in the writing, which is, for the most part, very lovely.

      But I found the structure of the book confusing and disjointed. There are letters from Iris to Eva that recount, in detail, things that Eva certainly would have known, since she was there. There are first-person accounts from Eva. There are third-person accounts from... someone. There are letters from Gus that are interesting, but since they're never delivered, he has to tell Eva everything that was in them when he finally makes it back home.

      In the third-person accounts, particularly, the viewpoints are kind of bizarre. There's one scene with Iris and Rose that I read three times, and finally figured out that it said "Rose" where it meant to say "Iris" (or Rose was giving herself a massage suddenly, in the middle of the paragraph). In the scene where Ruthie and Danny are at the rich girl's house, it's hard to figure out who's seeing what (and also, the inclusion of whole chapter made no sense; how did they meet someone in such a different economic situation? And how was it at all important, since she never showed up again?).

      Like many others, I found the cast of characters unbelievable. I found it hard to believe that in the 1940s, nearly every woman Iris is interested in is interested in her too. While that might have been true, I doubt that a lot of women would have a) acted on their interest; and b) been so open about their relationships with her, even in New York or Hollywood. They actually stole a little boy from an orphanage and then went around asking about his brother and nobody noticed? Their dad was actually not the Englishman he had always claimed to be, but was in fact Jewish and, what, American? (That's never explained AT ALL; it's just thrown in there at the end).

      The thing is, I kept reading because I liked the writing. But there were several times I almost gave up--even on a book as slim as this one--because it was just felt too contrived and confusing.
    • 4/5

      Apr 8, 2017

      Don't get comfortable. That's all.
    • 1/5

      Aug 16, 2016

      I had to force myself to finish it. The reviews sounded great. No matter how many topics she threw in (abandoned children, WWII, kidnapping, tarot, and on and on) to try to make this book seem interesting, it bombed. The plot never was developed and I never felt invested in any of the characters. Save your time.
    • 3/5

      Apr 12, 2016

      The story of 2 half sisters. And their dad, their moms, their faux dad the gay makeup artist, his sisters, Reenie the cook and her husband Gus (and his aliases), the Torellis, Danny, and their dad's jazz singer "friend", and her future husband, and Danny's best friend Ruthie.

      I did not enjoy this book as much as Away or Where the God of Love Hangs Out. The many stories in here just got a little too far-fetched for me. A light-skinned black jazz singer hooking up with old English professor dad--who is actually a reformed Jewish gangster who knew her and her brother back in Chicago? A German married to an Italian is reported to be a spy, and sent to a camp, where he assumes another man's identity and family, and is repatriated to Germany (where he has never been, and he does not speak German), survives the bombing in Pfortzheim, assumes a Jewish identity, and it gets crazier.

      As usual though, Bloom does a great job at giving her characters lives before and after the story itself takes place. But what happens to Ruthie?
    • 4/5

      Mar 30, 2016

      A modern family comes together around two sisters who didn't know each other existed until their teens. Loved the odyssey!
    • 4/5

      Mar 21, 2016

      Lucky Us by Amy Bloom is a highly recommended novel about unconventional familiar ties in their many varied forms and the whole spectrum of luck, good to bad, from 1939-1949.

      Right at the start Amy Bloom will hook you into reading the novel, Lucky Us, which opens in 1939 with 12 year old Eva and her mother going to see her father at his home after his wife died. Eva's mother runs off and abandons her there with her father, Edgar, but more importantly this begins Eva's relationship with her 16 year old half-sister, Iris. Eva soon makes it her job to support Iris as she attends and wins various speech contests around the area. The girls ban together to hide the money Iris wins from their father (who would steal it). After Iris graduates from high school (Eva skips several grades and makes it through 11th grade at age 14) , the girls set off together for Hollywood where Iris is going to be a star.

      After Iris does start on her way up, she is photographed with another actress and is blacklisted in Hollywood for their lesbian relationship. Francisco, a gay makeup artist, likes Iris and wants to help the girls. Just as he is waiting for Iris to tell him what has happened, their con-artist father, Edgar, shows up. The four then set off on a road trip across the country while preparing for their interviews as a butler and governess for the Torelli family, who live on an estate in Great Neck, Long Island. They get the job and move into the carriage house, where calamity still seems to follow the whole family.

      I will guarantee that Lucky Us will keep your attention and glued to the story to the end. Getting to the end will be a rather unpredictable ride. A good portion of the book is epistolary, told through letters from Iris and another character, Gus. As the story unfolds, it is told through several viewpoints, the main narration is by Eva, but others also share a part of the telling, including Iris, Gus, and Edgar. There will also never be a dull moment or a lull in the advancing story as one mishap seems to foretell another.

      There are a few short comings for me. While Iris's letters propel the story forward, in some ways it is awkward since she is reminiscing in them about shared experiences with Eva, something you'd likely not write, especially if sending a letter overseas. Additionally the dialogue doesn't seem to be set in the 40's. Finally, it doesn't seem true to life that the gay characters would be so open about their lifestyles during that period of time, along with interracial relationships. Setting those misgivings aside, Bloom does use these character traits to show that a family can be made up of many different people, not always related by blood but by mutual support and love.

      What is never in question is Bloom's enormous talent as a writer and there are several wonderful passages I can't help but quote:

      "My father had been a beaker of etiquette and big ideas, Iris was a vase of glamour, and I was the little brown jug of worry."

      "...I would have told you that no one came to see someone like me because they were happy. I would have said, People come because they are so frightened, they wake up in a sweat. They look into the well of their true selves, and the consequences of being who they are, and they’re horrified. They run to my little table to have me say that what they see is not what will happen."

      "We were like the soldiers in Stalingrad, moving forward only because backward wasn’t possible."


      Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Random House for review purposes.
    • 2/5

      Jan 17, 2016

      Didn't like it at all. No purpose, no cohesiveness, not interesting. Don't recommend it all.
    • 4/5

      Dec 20, 2015

      I really enjoy Bloom's writing. Lots of great characters set off in different directions and then brought back together. Very satisfying read.
    • 3/5

      Nov 7, 2015

      See full review @ The Indigo Quill

      Special thanks to Netgalley and Random House for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

      After receiving this book for review, I had heard good things about it on NPR. The reviews for Lucky Us are all over the place, so you may just have to read it yourself to decide what you think about it. It's definitely a unique work, and if you like a lot of dynamic and don't mind some explicit storytelling, then you will enjoy it. One reviewer didn't seem too impressed, and especially did not find the connection between the cover art and the pages that lie behind it. Related or not, the absurdity of a lion and a zebra stacked and balanced on a tight rope was appealing to me, but then again, my phone case has elephants flying by hot air balloon.

      Lucky Us is a story of two girls, Eva and Iris, who blindly feel their way through life after emerging from their dysfunctional and abandoned family unit. We are then catapulted into a series of quasi-unrelated events that somehow lead these girls from one experience to the next (and the reader isn't entirely sure how they got there).

      Iris is an emerging starlet who carries the potential to be America's next sweetheart. In the hype of Hollywood's glamour, she begins experimenting with her sexuality and the reader suddenly finds themselves in the center of several scandalous sexcapades. Needless to say, this is not a family-friendly book. Iris is betrayed by her fellow starlet and femme-fatale lover and is banished from the limelight forever.

      Eva, on the other hand, is the conventional one who lives in Iris' shadow, but she is also the storyteller and gives us a glimpse into the quiet-but-fierce persona of her own. She may not be another pretty face, but she definitely has a strong stomach, and so the reader learns to admire her through her narrative.

      This book possesses an exceptional level of realism and artistry that will leave you dazed and charmed all at once. Truly, it's a ripple effect of serial events that keeps the reader's attention because of its unpredictability. It's impossible to guess the ending or what is going to come next, so be prepared to adapt quickly and spend moments wounded and thrilled simultaneously. Because of this, you can't help but feel dynamic attachments to the characters. It's almost comedic how bizarre and jarring it all is.

      There are times when the plot seems to be in utter chaos, traveling around in strings weaving out and in between, but in the end they enter twine together to become a masterful design. If you enjoy a story that hybrids historical and modern society, and names its chapters after vintage song titles, then you'll love this book. Not to mention the mystery cover that leaves you both intrigued and scratching your head!
    • 2/5

      Jul 3, 2015

      Lucky Us by Amy Bloom was our last book club selection and discussion. It would seem it was a unanimous thumb's down. I had never heard of this book nor the author and based on the summary that I read on it in order to "vote" for our selection it didn't particularly appeal to me.

      This is the story of Eva who being raised alone by her mom while her dad sometimes "visited.". One day her mother decides to drop her off at her dad's house and never looks back. Eva finds out her dad was married to another woman who has since died and she also has a half sister named Iris. Thrown together unexpectedly they decide to make the best of their situation. Iris is successful in many local talent shows and has been saving her prize money in order to go to Hollywood. When Eva catches her dad rifling through Iris' room searching for the money Iris decides it's time to leave home now. Eva tags along and their adventure begins. They meet many noteworthy characters that manipulate their journey.

      I had difficulty connecting with any of these individuals except perhaps Eva who I think tried her best considering the hand she was dealt. There was too much chaos and dysfunction within the story for me to enjoy it. I grow weary of the characters using each other for gain, find it distasteful and as a result often wind up not liking the book. Unfortunately this was one of those times. I would not recommend this one.

      How I acquired this book: Half.com website
      Shelf Life: Less than 2 months
    • 4/5

      Jun 10, 2015

      There's not A TON of stuff going on here, but it's a very nicely written novel about an unusual family (that continues to add family members in unconventional ways) and their relationships with others. Sometimes I find it frustrating to read about people who seem to be drifting through their own lives, but in this case, I thought it was a good choice for telling this particular story. A young girl and her glamorous older sister run away to Hollywood, flee after a scandal, end up in Brooklyn, and then WWII happens. Four stars is a bit of a reach, but it was close.
    • 3/5

      May 15, 2015

      I wanted to like this novel, but there was just too much weirdness in the characters. They seemed more like comic book characters than real people. Odd things happened to them, they responded in strange ways...it could have been spellbinding or it could have been funny. But it wasn't. I only rated it as high as I did because I really like the ending, I'm just sorry it wasn't preceded by more I could like.
    • 4/5

      Jan 20, 2015

      ==========

      Someone once said: God gave us memory, so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.
      ==========

      When she was a young person just arrived in this country, Mrs. Gruber said she would cry from rage and frustration, because she couldn’t kill the people she wanted to kill.
      ==========
      As my father would have said, if he could talk, One should only take advantage of those who can afford it.

      ==========

      “People,” he said. “They can’t be underestimated.”
      ==========
    • 2/5

      Dec 4, 2014

      I often wonder if the reviews on the jacket are written by people that actually read the book.
    • 5/5

      Nov 15, 2014

      What a story and slice of life. I loved the way Bloom used letters and different points of view to give us a glimpse into this family in all its guises.
    • 4/5

      Nov 10, 2014

      Told from several points of view, the novel begins with the first person narrative of Eva, a 12 year old whose mother suddenly drops her off at her father's house and leaves forever. Her older half sister Iris becomes a pivotal person in her life, and the two of them run off to Hollywood together. Throughout, the chapters shift from Eva's first person to third person accounts of Iris, then Clara, then Gus, and settings from the early to late 1940's, Brooklyn, and Germany. Heartwarming characters balance the faults of Eva's parents, with the backdrop of the inhumanity of Hollywood and World War II. Some of the motivations seem unclear to me, in particular the enmity Eva comes to feel for Iris, but the ending wraps things up successfully.
    • 3/5

      Oct 26, 2014

      This was not a book I could connect with. I found no appeal in any of the characters so therefore their stories did not interest me. I kept reading in hopes of finding that special something I was looking for, but it never showed up. I did like the places the novel took me to, especially the beauty parlor and the tarot readings and the internment camps Gus was sent to. I guess if those are the highights of a book, then perhaps it was not a book for me. I am not sure of what customer I would recommend this book to and that does not happen often.
    • 3/5

      Oct 24, 2014

      A collection of vignettes that finally comes together.
    • 4/5

      Oct 12, 2014

      A novel about two half-sisters, the glamorous Iris and the bookish Eva, and their complicated and often very unlucky lives in the 1940s and beyond.

      I have very mixed feelings about this one. On an intellectual level, it's doing a lot of things I like. I like the diverse cast of characters and their unusual points of view, and I like the way Bloom peels back the layers of those characters, slowly revealing various interesting and disturbing things about them. But the problem is, pretty much all my appreciation was on an intellectual level. The characters never really came alive for me, and whatever weird or tragic things might happen to them, it never really affected me emotionally. Something about the writing just kept me constantly at one remove from it all.
    • 5/5

      Oct 8, 2014

      I admit to being an ardent fan of Amy Bloom's novels, her unique writing style and prose, her memorable characters, and her ability to transport me to another era in history. Lucky Us did not disappoint me, and I felt a particular connection with several characters and plot twists, likely because of my genealogy research and the stories I listened to as a child. I could almost know parts of these characters, and how history and luck shaped their lives, and how strange family and love can be.

      The story is told from a variety of perspectives, including letters, and I couldn't help but be reminded a bit of reading 84 Charring Cross Road, and how this heartbreaking, yet funny and surprising story was reminiscent of John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut for me. But Amy Bloom is unique and every time I read her novels, I remind myself that she is a poet, and can paint vivid pictures with a minimum of words.

      As always, I wished the story were longer, I wanted to know more about everything and everyone. But the author left me with a beautiful description of a snapshot that lets me fill in most of the blanks with my imagination. I've gone back to reread the last chapter several times and I can almost picture the scene and I know that the more of this story and these characters is simply love and family, in all its permutations.

      I highly recommend this book, for Amy Bloom fans and for those unfamiliar with her work. It is a book that will resonate for a very long time.
    • 3/5

      Oct 4, 2014

      Lucky Us is the story of Iris and Eva two half sisters who don't know that the other exists until they are thrown together after Iris's mothers funeral. I had a difficult time figuring out what was lucky about them as they had a tough time through out the book but they did manage to create a family and friends no matter where they were and that seemed to be the luck in their lives. I found the book to be very confusing because it was told by different people and thought that parts of it were just unbelievable. It was an ok book but I prefer Amy Bloom's short stories.
    • 2/5

      Oct 3, 2014

      With an attention getting book cover and the first lines being "My father's wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us." Amy Bloom has attracted readers to enter to world of Eva Logan. But that's all she did. Though the book cover, at least for me, had nothing to do with the novel itself, it does get one wondering on what's inside. Mind you I am not saying that this novel is BAD I am saying that it doesn't live up to the hipe of the first two lines or the book cover.

      Eva's life before the age of twelve was one in which she had no complaints, but that changed when her mother dropped her on Eva's father's door step and drove off, never to return again. Eva is astonished to find out that her father is actually a wealthy, college professor with a sixteen year old daughter. Though her father won't even acknowledge that she is his own daughter Eva becomes know to all as his niece. With all this negativity in her life the only person with whom she is treated nicely is her own half sister, Iris. After helping Iris with practicing to win competitions, Eva and Iris run to Hollywood on the money from the competitions.

      This is only the beginning, the drama piles up in the novel, but Amy Bloom does a wonderful job describing her scenes and the characters experiences that it doesn't read like a contemporary drama. Narrated by Eva Logan herself, Ms. Bloom interrupts the narrative with letters from Iris and another character. Thus, the reader is able to follow these other characters in their paralleled lives without derailing the main narrative.

      This novel shows that family is not just limited to the relatives you have but the people who love you too. Though life can through a lot of troubles your way all you have to do is dust yourself off, move forward and triumphs will come your way.
    • 4/5

      Oct 2, 2014

      As usual Amy Bloom does not disappoint! Lucky Us was such a joy to read with a clear, efficient writing style, Ms Bloom's starts with Eva abandoned by her mother at her philandering father and his daughters's front door. Eva tells the story of her and and her sister, Iris' lives for the next 20 years. Set in the 1940's, the 2 sisters bond and go on to make a new life for themselves,Iris following her dream of stardom and Eva supporting her sister. So many ups and downs that would make most people just give up.
      I loved this book and love Ms Blooms style where she often tells what the future was for characters as they exit the story.
    • 4/5

      Oct 2, 2014

      Enjoyed this book. Loved hearing the story of these two sisters, the friendships they made along the way, the struggles they faced, and the hardships they overcome. This is a quick read, and if you love the 1940's, it's definitely a trip back in time. Each chapter is the title of a song from the era, I made a Spotify playlist based on the chapter titles ad listened to it while I read. Different style of music than I'm used to, but I liked that I was able to gain some insight into what the author was inspired by while writing this book.
    • 1/5

      Sep 25, 2014

      I found this book hard to follow and the plot and purpose totally escaped me. If not for my book club I would not have finished it. I would have tossed it after the first 50 pages. Gratuitous lesbian sex orgy did not entice me to finish it. Only perserverance did. I found the characters disjointed and only fractionally connected which led to a somewhat belabored ending of a "blended" type family. Would not recommend.