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HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim

I wish authors and editors would realize that the eBook format does not accommodate footnotes very well.  They all appear at the end of the chapter, so that all context is forgotten.  Also, a chart with highlighting showed no highlighting whatsoever on my kindle.  All that aside, this book is a missing-person mystery with a bunch of other unnecessary asides, and because of these diversions, I did not like it as well as Miracle Creek.  Adam, a stay-at-home dad, disappears after an outing with his son Eugene, who is autistic and, due to other complications, unable to speak.  Eugene returns alone, visibly agitated.  The family, especially Mia, Adam’s twenty-something daughter and first-person narrator, entertain various theories about what happened to Adam:  he ran off with a mistress, or he committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis, or worst of all, Eugene pushed him into a raging river.  No one can quite fathom any of these scenarios, and it becomes increasingly likely that Adam is dead.  This novel is very suspenseful, but it has too many distractions, the primary one being Adam’s research into the quantification of happiness.  Really?  The book’s early examples of how unpredictable happiness is and how it is relative to a baseline, such as winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury, are intriguing.  However, this “happiness quotient” is a topic that the author overemphasizes throughout the book, and I don’t really understand why.  It seems to be a theory that she wanted to convey somewhere, and this novel was as good a vehicle as any.


This post first appeared on Patti's Pages, please read the originial post: here

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HAPPINESS FALLS by Angie Kim

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