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" The ironies in Lucky Us (Random House), Amy Bloom&amp;#039;s latest marvelous picaresque entertainment, begin with the title and proliferate rapidly from there on forked paths and forked tongues. And yet, and yet\u2026Bloom&amp;#039;s bewitching world is such that the title can also, when all is said and done, be given an absolutely straight reading.  Eva Logan&amp;#039;s mother deposits Eva at age 12 with her baby daddy\u2014dapper, worldly Professor Edgar Acton\u2014in the town of Windsor, Ohio, and disappears. Eva discovers she has a half sister\u2014Iris, 16\u2014whose mother has just died. Iris is quite a piece of work, a compulsive and ambitious speechifier and performer; and Dad turns out to be both more and less than, and in any case altogether peculiarly different from, what he had seemed. So, tiring of his act, the girls sneak off on a bus to Hollywood in 1941, where in short order Iris manages to become &amp;quot;an MGM artist,&amp;quot; while Eva, now a high school dropout and still only in her mid-teens, does her best to be her sister&amp;#039;s helpmeet. And that&amp;#039;s just in the first 20 pages. Needless to say, we&amp;#039;re nowhere remotely near Happily Ever After, and following this fizzy prelude, our heroines&amp;#039; prospects darken, brighten, and darken again with every turn of Bloom&amp;#039;s cosmic kaleidoscope. Parades of finely drawn characters\u2014a 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\u2014enter and leave the scene. In time, Eva emerges as having an unerring moral compass\u2014even as she becomes a fortune-teller to make ends meet. Why does she do it? Because, as her father says, &amp;quot;the stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.&amp;quot; To read Bloom&amp;#039;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\u2014it&amp;#039;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. This article appeared in the August 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a12801/beginners-luck-review-amy-bloom/?click=hprc>