Amazon.com: Customer reviews: We Were the Lucky Ones: A Novel

Top positive review

Excellent Read!

February 2, 2018

I absolutely loved this book. I have read many stories detailing the horrors Jews faced throughout Europe before, during, and after World War II....and expected this story to be similar. It was different...I connected with it far more that other stories of the same genre. Perhaps knowing it was based on the author's family made it all the more moving. It is a book that I finished a few weeks ago, but cannot stop talking about to friends and family. It is a story that has stayed with me. I highly recommend!

317 people found this helpful

Top critical review

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Neverjust2

So close to being great, but doesn't quite make it

March 20, 2018

This book is so close to being great, but misses the fence.Bouncing around from character to character for each chapter makes for a cumbersome read. Keeping track of characters that were left several chapters ago, to be reunited with them later and having to recall via the family tree provided where they fit in is rather time consuming. It takes a few rounds to keep them straight and often times felt like the characters were being abandoned. The story is amazing in that a family survives. This is one book that if done right will make a better movie.

41 people found this helpful

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Patrizia

Gripping story, but seriously flawed novel

August 21, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I wish I had better enjoyed reading this. It does important work in showing the varieties of experiences suffered by Holocaust survivors, and I liked the structural device of following the war chronologically, yet skipping among the stories of all the characters, and what each was doing during a certain time. However, 3 things really bothered me. First, the characters are all improbably idealized, probably because the author is writing about her own family. Yes, these characters did many brave and even heroic things, but no one ever got angry, no one ever had a bad mood, no o ne argued over doing the dishes, everyone loved one another every second. It's true that twice female characers suffered debilitating depressions, but each time she had a baby, and that fixed it. Second, all the characters long for home, family, and life before the Nazis arrived, which is probably very true, and understandable. But in the novel, this means that almost every chapter has some character yearning once again for a Passover dinner, and those reperated scenes of nostalgia got tedious. Third, I found the writing rather flat. There's nothing sparkly about the prose style. So, which the book tells an important story and kept me reading until the end (although I skipped the Passover dinner scenes after a while), I don't think it's as well done as most other commentators do. Hard to criticize a heartfelt novel about Holocaust survivors, but as a novel, it has glaring (to me) weaknesses.

23 people found this helpful

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Dusty

Confusing because of lifeless characters

April 28, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Once I saw that this was a family memoir (notes at the end of the book), the writing made more sense. Glad it wasn't only me who had trouble keeping track of who was who. Eventually I quit trying to remember if I was reading about a son or son-in-law, a daughter or daughter-in-law, sister, brother or parent, but this ruined the storylines. This was more like a book of historical facts with names thrown in. I'm sure the real family adores it - because they know who they are reading about! It was difficult to finish.

2 people found this helpful

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Roger C Barnes DC

Try Herman Wouk

June 5, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I wanted to like it more. I resorted to keeping track of the characters on a piece of paper; who was related to who and where they were. Clearly a story that needs to be told and re-told. A better read of Nazi's and Poland are the two Herman Wouk books - "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance".

5 people found this helpful

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Claudia

A family tree at the brginming would have been helpful. It's It could also be greatly condensed without losing the spirit and intent of the book.

August 27, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

It's an amazing story of survival amidst tremendous odds, but would have benefited from less fictitious description. A family tree, at the beginning, would have helped too.

2 people found this helpful

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22 comments

Amazon Customer

Reads like a dull textbook that wants you to cry

October 23, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Characters are flat and I never felt invested in them. Story reads like a textbook of the various horrors people experienced during the Holocaust, which is fine except that it's fiction so I hoped for more feeling. I'm a granddaughter of a survivor and I've read a lot of books on the Holocaust, but I couldn't bear to finish reading this because it's so boring and horrific at the same time,. I think it's important for people to really understand and feel what happened so it doesn't happen again, but I wouldn't recommend this book for the purpose.

21 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Amazing

November 27, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A story of survival, how members of one extended family lived through the atrocities of Hitler. Kept me mesmerized, shocked, in awe . Very thought-provoking and now I want to learn more about Poland and its people, and the years after the war

One person found this helpful

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11 comment

Orcasgracie

Not a good read...

June 13, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I found this book to be only marginally interesting....it jumped around too much and doesn't let you know the characters. Oh well.

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Dacorated

Awkward writing

July 9, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Good story but horrible writing. Couldn't stick with it.

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Jennifer Richards

long

April 12, 2019

Format: Audible AudiobookVerified Purchase

I felt like the beginning of story took a while to get interesting, if was a good story overall i guess

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Elaine Wois

to much eye strain !!

July 16, 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The print is so very small, lines are to close together, print is to light , pages are crinkled as if they were wet and then dried. Having a hard time reading because of this.

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