Lucky Us

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.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
On a journey from Ohio to Hollywood to Long Island to London in the 1940s, a couple of plucky half sisters continually reinvent themselves with the help of an unconventional assortment of friends and relatives.In 1939, 12-year-old Eva is abandoned by her feckless mother on her father's Ohio doorstep after the death of his wealthy wife. After a couple of years of neglect, Eva and her glamorous older half sister, Iris, escape to Hollywood, where Iris embarks on a promising career in film-until she's caught on camera in a lesbian dalliance with a starlet, which gets her blacklisted. With the help of a sympathetic gay Mexican makeup artist as well as their con-artist father, Edgar, who has recently reappeared in their lives, the girls travel across the country to New York and finagle jobs at the Great Neck estate of a wealthy Italian immigrant family. Hired as a governess, Iris promptly falls in love with the family's pretty cook, Reenie, inconveniently married to Gus, a likable mechanic of German ancestry. In this partly epistolary novel interspersed with both first-person and third-person narration, Bloom (Where the God of Love Hangs Out, 2010, etc.) tells a bittersweet story from multiple viewpoints. The novel shares the perspectives of Eva, Iris, Edgar, Gus and Cora, a black nightclub singer who becomes Edgar's live-in girlfriend and companion to Eva. Though the letter-writing conceit doesn't always ring true, since it's unlikely that one sister would recount their shared experiences to the other in letters years later, the novel works in aggregate, accumulating outlooks to tell a multilayered, historical tale about different kinds of love and family.Bloom enlivens her story with understated humor as well as offbeat and unforgettable characters. Despite a couple of anachronisms, this is a hard-luck coming-of-age story with heart.

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Starred review from March 15, 2014

For her latest, Bloom (Away) offers something unrepentantly quirky, a madcap romp complete with road trips, secret identities, aspiring Hollywood starlets, and a tarot card-reading fake psychic. Like many screwball comedies, it starts off during the Great Depression, but it reaches its emotional climax during World War II. Eva and Iris are half sisters who flee the Midwest for California only to find themselves on the road again, heading east with their father. Along the way, they pick up strays such as German American Gus, creating a family of misfits. Gus is eventually sent to an internment camp and later repatriated to Germany, leaving Eva to hold together the remains of her patchwork clan after big sister Iris flees to England. VERDICT At its core, this is a novel of resilience, with the war serving as both a life-changing event and no more than the background noise of an impoverished existence. Full of intriguing characters and lots of surprises, it's not for those who have taken a stand against offbeat characters, but readers of literary fiction and 20th-century historicals, as well as fans of wacky humor, will find it an excellent choice. [See Prepub Alert, 2/10/14.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2014
Eva, age 12, knows her father as a sweet man who visits on Sundays, until her mother announces that his wife has died and they'll be paying him a visit. And so Eva arrives at a home she's never seen to live with her father and older half sister, Iris, whom she didn't know existed. Talented, self-involved Iris is a doggedly hopeful performer, winning every local and regional competition in their small midwestern college town before graduating high school and escaping to Hollywood with the embarrassing but brainy and reliable Eva in tow. There is a gossip-column scandal and a cross-country road trip, an abducted orphan and an accused spy, and more than a couple of masquerades, but everything here is fresh; Bloom's cannonballs read like placid ripples. Told partially from Eva's perspective, and with epistolary interludes over the novel's 193949 span, Eva's world is one of endless opportunities for reinventionand redemptionif one only takes them. With a spare and trusting style, Bloom invites readers to fill the spaces her pretty prose allows, with true and beautiful results. High-Demand Backstory: An extensive marketing campaign and author tour will accompany review attention, to the benefit of fans of Bloom's best-selling historical novel Away (2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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.