⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ .75 Pros: cute without being corny, characters I loved, found family, fake dating, honest
Cons: a little slow to start, I wanted more from some of the characters/relationships
TW: Death of parent, Sexual content, Grief, Alcohol, Drug use, Mental illness, Pregnancy, Medical content
Emily Henry is the one of the authors who makes it possible for me to enjoy romance and Happy Place just solidified that.
Last year, when we read her novel Book Lovers for Weirdo Book Club, I fell in love with the audiobook. Emily Henry and narrator Julia Whelan are a dream duo at bringing these stories to life. Whelan has a cadence and style that just works so perfectly with Henry's words, I can't recommend the audio versions of these enough. Happy Place comes out on April 25, 2023 and I got to enjoy this audiobook early courtesy of Libro.fm. I was so thrilled to see it pop up in our April ALC catalog.
While I didn't love this one quite as much as Book Lovers, I still found Happy Place to be an honest, sweet and at times, heartbreaking story and I can't wait to tell you about it.
Overview
Our main character and narrator is Harriet and she is in a pickle. Her best friend Sabrina has invited their whole friend group to stay for a week at her family's cottage in Maine. This cottage has been a place of happiness for them for over a decade and this trip is meant to serve as their one last goodbye before Sabrina's parents sell the property. The pickle? Harriet and her boyfriend Wyn (also in the friend group and invited to the cottage) broke up months ago and never told their friends. They agree to keep up appearances for the week and then tell everyone afterward but Harriet is still heartbroken over their break up. The drama!
The story is told in 2 timelines: real life and happy place. Real life is telling the events unfolding currently while happy place is telling stories of the past, shedding light onto the friendships and her relationship with Wyn aka where Harriet felt happiest. I thought this was a really smart way of telling the story and giving us insight into the dynamics of the friend group, Harriet and Wyn as individuals and as a couple. It worked really well for me.
Minor Spoilers
I liked Harriet and Wyn a lot, their relationship and more specifically, their break up felt very honest. Typically in stories, relationships end in a dramatic way but Harriet and Wyn unintentionally drifted away from each other gradually in the face of grief. While doing their best not to impose on each other, they slowly turned away from each other and into themselves which led to their ultimate break up. Once all of this is discussed by them in some of the final chapters, I felt it all with them. Wyn discussed his mental health and how he's taking medication, Harriet talked about how the job she had spent years pursuing wasn't making her happy. I really loved how they finally got to tell each other all these things.
The dual timelines I discussed were SO effective in this story, especially at the end when real life and happy place converge. Every cell in my body felt pleased with that. I wasn't just happy that they got back together, I was happy that her "happy place" didn't end up being solely Wyn. A lot of romance novels are tied up neatly with "she got the guy and lived happily ever after" but I should've known to expect more from Henry. She tackles relationships in such a real way while tackling problems such as grief, loneliness, keeping up appearances, people pleasing, losing yourself, falling out of touch with your friends, stagnancy, complacency, outgrowing the life you worked so hard for, family and how they affect you and your relationships; at the end of it all, Harriet discovered what she really wanted and how to make her "happy place" into something that exists in the present, something she chooses every day and not something she is stuck looking back on. That was everything.
Also, please enjoy my GoodReads review and follow me there if you'd like! This review is a great summary of all the things I plan to discuss at length below.
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