Book Club Friday: Review and Giveaway of Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

So far I'm on track with my Summer Book Challenge. Every book I've read this summer has contributed to the challenge categories. Since my recap at the beginning of the month, I've read American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, with "sex" being my chosen antonym to "abstinence" (A is for Abstinence by Kelly Oram!).  

My latest read is Lucky Us by Amy Bloom, in bookstores on July 29th. I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of the novel in exchange for my honest review.*

 

Official book summary: “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 the story of teenage half sisters Eva and Iris in this brilliantly written, deeply moving, and fantastically funny novel by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey across 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the sisters from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with memorable characters and unexpected turns, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, these unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

Based on the description, I was expecting another kind of book. I thought more of the focus would be on Iris's quest for stardom. Even so, I LOVED this book. 

The characters are deeply flawed, but in a very human way. The father is selfish and aimless. Iris is ruthless in pursuit of both stardom and love. Eva is a colorless character, lacking her own personality and dreams.

But Lucky Us is, in many ways, a coming-of-age novel not just for Eva, but for Iris and even their father as well. Each character (eventually) grows and matures in their own way. 

While other reviews have not liked the use of letters to introduce new chapters, I disagree. I think that's a personal stylistic preference, but I like the mixing of letters and prose. If you tend to skim chapter titles, though, just realize that some of the letters are marked as never sent. So while we get to read the character's thoughts in the letter, the recipient never had the chance to read it. 

So far, I have avoided spoilers in my review, but I want to include a few small spoilers to explain my favorite parts of the novel. You have been warned.

ENTERING THE SPOILER ZONE

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Iris is a lesbian. Despite the book's setting against the backdrop of WWII, Iris's same-sex attraction and relationships with women are completely accepted by the few people allowed to know. Of course, it is a scandal when a photographer catches Iris having sex on the beach with a big Hollywood star who then betrays Iris and has the rising starlet blacklisted from the town. 

I won't say the most despicable or even the second-most despicable thing that Iris later does for love, but they are pretty horrible and eventually cause a long-lasting rift with Eva. 

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LEAVING THE SPOILER ZONE

Due to the generosity of Random House, one lucky reader will win a copy of Lucky Us! Sadly, this is only open to US readers. Alas. Enter using the Rafflecopter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

*I received both a book and a gift card in exchange for my honest review.

Wedding Wednesday: The Demi-Vièrge Wore White

Contrary to popular belief, brides wearing white on their wedding day has nothing to do with virginity. Of course, Americans tend to rewrite history all the time, so I'm not that surprised that the average person assumes the white wedding dress has something to do with "sexual purity." In reality, Queen Victoria started a new fashion trend among the elite when she opted to wear an off-white wedding dress in 1840. Or at least, she eventually popularized a trend that was already rising among the very wealthy.

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From this really awesome article, "Queen Victoria's Wedding Dress: The One That Started It All."

Long before Victoria, white was a popular choice for wedding dresses, at least among the wealthy nobility... Weddings were usually more about political alliances and transfers of wealth than they were about romance, and so the wedding dress was just another excuse to show the wealth and culture of the brides family... Before the invention of effective bleaching techniques, white was a valued colour: it was both difficult to achieve, and hard to maintain. Wealthy brides, then, often wore white to demonstrate their money, not their purity.

In order to stimulate and support the lace industry [struggling due to industrialization], Victoria chose for her wedding dress a large piece of handmade Honiton lace... The rest of the dress then became a vehicle to showcase the lace, and white was chosen as the most suitable colour to do this. In the case of Victoria’s dress, white symbolised practicality and patriotism, rather than purity.

So if a white dress didn't actually represent my virginal status, why did everyone's favorite demi-vièrge choose to wear one?

I didn't always intend to wear a white wedding dress. When I was a kid, I told my parents I wanted to get married in a rainbow-colored wedding dress. In high school, when I wore a big pink poofy princess dress in the Junior Miss pageant, I told the other girls that I wanted to get married in it. 

But after my debutante ball, I assumed I would just wear my debutante dress again. Spending a lot of money on two formal white dresses to wear one time only just didn't make sense to me, and I LOVED my debutante dress. So why wouldn't I wear it to get married?

One of my formal debutante portraits

Book Club Friday: American Savage

One of my successful goals of my birthday weekend was to spend a lot of time reading, preferably a book from my Summer Book Challenge. While I couldn't find my original choice of Dan Savage's The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family at my local elibrary, I was able to check out a copy of American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics.

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From Amazon: On the heels of his Emmy-winning It Gets Better campaign, columnist and provocateur Dan Savage weighs in on such diverse issues as healthcare, gun control, and marriage equality with characteristic straight talk and humor.

Dan Savage is famous--and to some, infamous--for many reasons. To name just a few: he's the author of America's leading sex advice column, the frank and expletive-filled "Savage Love;" co-founder of the Emmy Award-winning "It Gets Better Project," a YouTube campaign aimed at LGBT youth that swept the globe in 2010; and he wrote the groundbreaking 1999 memoir The Kid about adopting a son with his partner (now husband) Terry, which helped inspire same-sex couples nationwide to adopt.
 
Dan has long been an advocate for marriage equality and LGBT rights, and AMERICAN SAVAGE contains some of his most personal and reflective essays on those subjects to date.



The Beautiful: Dan's chapter on his mother and Catholicism made me cry, several times, in fact. It was raw and honest and much more emotional than I was expecting. 

The Awesome: Everything on the Bible and homophobia and bullying and "the Bible got slavery wrong, so maybe it got human sexuality wrong" is just awesome. Kudos.

The Rage-Inducing: WTF are you doing blaming biphobia on bisexual people?! Are you fucking kidding me?! Maybe instead of telling us to come out more, completely ignoring the fact that we deal with the same conservative families and religions that piss on gay and lesbian people, with the added bonus of gays and lesbians pissing on us, you should tell gay and lesbian teenagers and 20-somethings to stop calling themselves bisexual. It's not the fault of the bisexual community that some gay people use our sexual orientation as a stepping stone to admitting their own sexual orientation. And even if they DO decide to do that, we need to take people at their word when they label themselves.  

Overall, it was fast and interesting read, filled with excellent footnotes and academic citations. He backs up much of what he says with outside sources, which made this nerd very happy. 

 

*Why yes, that's an Amazon Affiliate link on the book picture 

More Cheap Ebooks from Summer Book Crush!

I bought five books during last year's event, and I really enjoyed them! I can't wait to snag a few new fluffy teen reads this summer! This is a sponsored-ish post, like last year's post, because I have a chance to win a gift card, but I am genuinely excited to buy some new books for only $0.99 each!

What would you say to over 80 titles with many undeniably-hot BOOK BOYFRIENDS that leave you wanting more? Yep, we've got you covered. The second annual SUMMER BOOK CRUSH event runs this year from June 19th through June 22nd. Don't miss it, or you will have to wait a full year for the next one!

So many ways to fall in love with just a right BOOK BOYFRIEND! And the best part? You can purchase your dream Book Boyfriend for only 99¢ each, but for a limited time only.

Yet Another Virgin Casting Call--Too Bad I'm No Longer a Virgin!

So apparently I'm the go-to person for virgin documentaries and reality TV shows. Alas, since I'm an old married lady and all, I no longer qualify for casting calls for virgin productions. 

But if YOU are a virgin, and you are interested in a weekend-long intimacy retreat, then keep reading!

Qualifications:

• You are part of a couple in a committed long-term relationship
• You and/or your partner is a virgin
• You have not yet consummated your relationship
• You are both Americans

Each couple will have the opportunity to go on a weekend-long, all expenses paid, intimacy retreat with world renowned Christian relationship experts who will help you and your significant other work together on your journey. Whether you have chosen abstinence for spiritual, medical, or emotional reasons, we will work with two committed people who are interested in taking the next steps in their relationship. 

The goal of this retreat and the ultimate series is to build a strong foundation as each couple embarks on a new and exciting chapter. If you would like the chance to work with the best sexual therapists in the country to enhance your emotional and physical life with your partner, this opportunity is for you.

For more information, or to talk to a casting director, email RelationshipRetreatCasting@gmail.com 

There are no guarantees that this will be half as good as the documentary How to Lose Your Virginity, but who isn't interested in a free romantic weekend retreat?