Lucky Us is the strangely mesmerizing tale of two half-sisters growing up in the Depression era. Eva and Iris’s story commences when they are teenagers in Ohio, and winds through Hollywood, Long Island, Germany and England. At a time when the entire world seems to be going topsy-turvy, their own hectic lives somehow seem grounded. There is an epistolary mechanism that permeates the book, hinting at future tragedy; the storyline jumps around in time quite a bit, as does the narrative perspective. Altogether the entire thing feels a bit like a drawn-out conversation; while Eva’s voice dominates, the other characters seem to pipe in from time to time and interrupt her regularly.

The book is largely character-driven, with the plot an almost secondhand consideration. Indeed, there is nothing all that compelling which happens to any of the main characters. The most interesting storyline belongs to Gus, a secondary character introduced halfway through the story; and his character seems to be something of a device to illustrate the chaos of the times. Setting him aside, this cast of characters is compelling and fascinating, thrown together by some combination of fate and luck, each flawed and imperfect in her own way, but at the end of the day sweet and delightful. Iris, who is perhaps the closest thing we have to a villain in the story, is still a lovable, sympathetic woman - she is clearly doing her best to fit into a world which doesn’t quite know what to do with her. Eva, who is our hero, seems an oddly passive one, living in the shadows of her big sister and her father for decades at a stretch. She takes almost no initiative of her own accord, until her big growing-up moment late in the story line - and even this moment seems underwhelming, an accident of circumstance more than anything else. For all that, she seems to be driving the story in her own subtle and enigmatic ways, guiding the fate of the family more through her own stoic good cheer than through anything else.

I quite enjoyed the epistolary elements of the story telling. In addition to a devilishly drawn-out foreshadowing of tragedy to come, I found this mechanism gave an otherwise mundane plot a feeling of pitched tragedy, with an underlining of bitter comedy. Although the letters that Iris and Gus send Eva are an adornment on top of the main story line, in an odd way they seem to emphasize the skeleton of the story, giving shape and substance to the fundamentals of this epic family history.

On the whole I enjoyed this book. It was nether too flippant nor too tragic, and was an interesting look at life in the mid-century. Certainly a worthwhile read.