BOOK REVIEW: 'Lucky Us' by Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom has crafted a novel that is highly amusing, frequently heartwarming and unabashedly off-kilter. Edgar, the ne’er-do-well father, is a Jewish bootlegger, turned professor of elocution and rhetoric, turned English butler. Iris, the charismatic older sister, is an aspiring Hollywood starlet, turned governess, turned working London actress. And Eva, the abandoned younger sister, is a bookish dropout, turned beauty parlor fortuneteller, turned falsely credentialed medical school applicant. In “Lucky Us,” the members of the Acton family habitually reinvent themselves by any means necessary. 

The novel begins with Eva’s mother — the other woman — dropping Eva on Edgar’s doorstep only days after Iris’s mother has died. Despite Iris’s initial antagonism toward her new half-sister, Eva soon becomes Iris’s sidekick when the girls find themselves unified by their mistrust of Edgar’s thievery and deceit and by Iris’s focused ambition.  

Both to escape Edgar and to pursue Iris’s dreams of stardom, the sisters set out for California. The adventures that follow span across this country and the Atlantic and find the Actons reunited and forging, faking and fumbling their ways through new identities. Eva is routinely left to pick up the pieces when Iris and Edgar shift from one role to the next because of scandal, boredom or tragedy. But not to be outdone, Eva also displays a willingness — though not always a gift — for assuming new roles of her own. 

Although the novel is told largely from Eva’s perspective, it also progresses through correspondence, sometimes unsent and almost always unreceived, that is peppered throughout the narrative. Through these letters, the characters reveal truths they would not otherwise disclose, and the reader gains insight into the characters’ emotions, many of which seem unconscious or at least unacknowledged. 

One emotional constant in the novel is Eva’s longing for parental affection. This yearning motivates Eva to form attachments to a number of unlikely characters and to create a thoroughly unconventional family unit that expands and contracts as the narrative progresses. Ultimately, this rag-tag family and her own position at its center give Eva the security, acceptance and sense of self she craves. 

“Lucky Us” is both well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining — the perfect end-of-summer diversion.


“Lucky Us” is available at Bookstore1Sarasota, 1359 Main St., Sarasota. Call 365-7900 for more information.
 

Top 10 fiction titles at Bookstore1 this month:

“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr
“The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt
“Beautiful Ruins” by Jess Walter
“Orphan Train” by Christina Baker Kline
“A Land Remembered” by Patrick Smith
“Midnight in Europe” by Alan Furst
“The Dinner” by Herman Koch
“Me Before You” by Jojo Moyes
“100-Year-Old Man . . . ” by Jonas Jonasson
“Doctor Sleep” by Stephen King