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jolou's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
book_chat_girl's review against another edition
3.0
Beautiful writing, interesting and finely-drawn characters. I would have rated it higher if there were fewer storylines/ backstories. Lots to pay attention to.
tsol's review against another edition
5.0
A really beautifully written (straight forward sentences moving forward all along) ideas novel about adaptability and resilience wrapped in layers of human connections and animal connections and human/animal interactions.
carduelia_carduelis's review against another edition
5.0
I picked this up in spite of the terrible title. I typically leave it long enough, after buying a book, that I can't remember what it was about in the first place and so it was with this one. And I have to say that for the first hundred or so pages, I still wasn't sure I'd recovered the plot.
There are two central characters: Attila who is a Ghanian psychiatrist specialising in hostage situations, war-zones, and other traumatic incidents and Jean, an American urban-canine specialist who moonlights as a green-spaces designer/gardener for hire. Attila is by far the more interesting of the two for most of the first half of the book. The way he moves through London, through places familiar to me, and both treats and experiences them in a way that entirely different to how I would is something that I found very refreshing. In some ways, though, he is too noble a character - never angering, taking a mis-step or making a mistake, always patient. The trials and conflicts he encounters in this book are never, even remotely, his doing, but he bears them and and fights on with good grace and humour. I'm not quite sure he's a real person.
Jean is a little more balanced in that some of her issues stem from her personality, see her relationship with her family for example. Even so, she's never really wrong, rather she's sometimes out of step with those around her. Her back story is really great, she's a behavioural zoologist and her dedication to her work has put up a lot of boundaries between her and her ex-husband and, for some reason, her son. In particular, this conflict between professional and personal life is something that we don't see Attila experience which is a very familiar gendered bias.
Despite my preference for Attila's story, it's Jean's narrative that really ties this book together.
As she talks about the language people use to describe urban canines like foxes and coyotes, how a rare interaction with a human is played up by the media, how people speak of being displaced from their homes, living in fear, 'think of the children', I was instantly thrown back to Yorkshire in the mid-2000's.
I'd heard this rhetoric before, but not about the fox hunting ban. When I heard it, as a young teen on the radio on my walk to school, it was about muslims. Muslims infiltrating the country and bringing bad ideas and bad crowds with them.
And instantly the whole book came together for me. This is an incredibly clever framing of US and UK culture (and probably much of Western Europe) right now. It perfectly captures the paranoia of how traditional cultures are changing from an influx of people escaping terrors we can't fathom. And how, in fact, immigrants have been here for a long time and they will keep coming - that conservative values have no place in nature. It's told from so many points of view that I only saw it a third of the way in. The book isn't preaching or unpleasant, which is maybe why it hits so hard.
On top of all of this the writing is really beautiful. Forna is dealing with two, quite reserved, people and she captures their thoughts in the quiet moments between plot, where they watch birds or wind or water and think. These parts of the book are what really pushed this up to a 5-star read for me.
I don't want to say any more because the beauty of this one is really in all the supporting stories and characters. Highly recommended.
There are two central characters: Attila who is a Ghanian psychiatrist specialising in hostage situations, war-zones, and other traumatic incidents and Jean, an American urban-canine specialist who moonlights as a green-spaces designer/gardener for hire. Attila is by far the more interesting of the two for most of the first half of the book. The way he moves through London, through places familiar to me, and both treats and experiences them in a way that entirely different to how I would is something that I found very refreshing. In some ways, though, he is too noble a character - never angering, taking a mis-step or making a mistake, always patient. The trials and conflicts he encounters in this book are never, even remotely, his doing, but he bears them and and fights on with good grace and humour. I'm not quite sure he's a real person.
Jean is a little more balanced in that some of her issues stem from her personality, see her relationship with her family for example. Even so, she's never really wrong, rather she's sometimes out of step with those around her. Her back story is really great, she's a behavioural zoologist and her dedication to her work has put up a lot of boundaries between her and her ex-husband and, for some reason, her son. In particular, this conflict between professional and personal life is something that we don't see Attila experience which is a very familiar gendered bias.
Despite my preference for Attila's story, it's Jean's narrative that really ties this book together.
As she talks about the language people use to describe urban canines like foxes and coyotes, how a rare interaction with a human is played up by the media, how people speak of being displaced from their homes, living in fear, 'think of the children', I was instantly thrown back to Yorkshire in the mid-2000's.
I'd heard this rhetoric before, but not about the fox hunting ban. When I heard it, as a young teen on the radio on my walk to school, it was about muslims. Muslims infiltrating the country and bringing bad ideas and bad crowds with them.
And instantly the whole book came together for me. This is an incredibly clever framing of US and UK culture (and probably much of Western Europe) right now. It perfectly captures the paranoia of how traditional cultures are changing from an influx of people escaping terrors we can't fathom. And how, in fact, immigrants have been here for a long time and they will keep coming - that conservative values have no place in nature. It's told from so many points of view that I only saw it a third of the way in. The book isn't preaching or unpleasant, which is maybe why it hits so hard.
On top of all of this the writing is really beautiful. Forna is dealing with two, quite reserved, people and she captures their thoughts in the quiet moments between plot, where they watch birds or wind or water and think. These parts of the book are what really pushed this up to a 5-star read for me.
I don't want to say any more because the beauty of this one is really in all the supporting stories and characters. Highly recommended.
joco32's review against another edition
5.0
This tale of Attila, a renowned psychologist, and Jean, a biologist/scientist, totally enthralled me, not just because I am familiar with the areas of London in which much of the story takes place. The way Aminatta Forma built up not only these but all the less important characters created a depth of knowledge about their lives which made me long for the happy ending which in my heart I knew would not come for all of them. Whilst the subtle shifts from past to present times reminded me of what I enjoy in the work of Kate Morton.
kflo818's review against another edition
4.0
When I first started this, I really didn’t want to like it. The writing style was not quite right for me, and I wasn’t sure where the storyline was going. That said, the book and its characters grew tremendously on me over time. I have an ARC, so your mileage may vary, but in the end I found the book to be a very beautiful story about humanity, love, and loss.
ninaprime's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars - Forna weaves together a many-layered story of connection, trauma, and loss, positing that ultimately humans need those experiences to understand and embrace happiness. I found the characters interesting, particularly the immigrant street-sweepers and doormen that contribute to Jean's study and Attila's hunt for his missing neice, but the plot moves at a tepid pace and not all the threads came together for me.
Book club selection, July 2022
Book club selection, July 2022
vasta's review against another edition
5.0
There are foxes in our backyard. I have only seen one once, but have seen their tracks in the snow or the frost, and occasionally in the wet spring mud. Prior to reading Ms. Forna’s novel, I had never thought about the interior lives of these foxes and how they experience the world, but now I can’t stop thinking about them. Happiness is ostensibly a novel about connections between people and the impacts of trauma, but really, it is a novel about being in touch with the living world around us, and how so much delight can be found when we commune with the urban natural environment.
michellemorgs's review against another edition
5.0
It took me a bit to get into the groove of this book but by the end I was completely enamored with it. Other reviews use words like slow, quiet, and subtle and those are all true— this isn’t a novel driven by plot (through in hindsight the whole thing takes place over the course of maybe a week and so I’m not sure that’s even a fair characterization— by shortening the timeframe the novel unfurls in, I think Forna is able to background plot and really dive into her characters. I mean, a lot actually happens in the week of Happiness’s landscape). Instead, it’s about relationships, ecologies and immigration, both human and animal, survival, trauma, the losses we bear whether from the sad disappointments of unrealized relationships to those borne by war and violence. It’s a story about care and community. This book made me look at the strangers around me in a different way. It made me want to be a better person which is more profound I think than such a cliche would usually suggest. It made me think about change and suffering in a new light. It’s definitely a book to let yourself sink into and experience. I had this on my list for over a year and a half before I got to it but I’m glad I read it as my first book of 2020. It feels like it might set the mood for my upcoming decade.
amolotkov's review against another edition
5.0
A carefully woven web of several very relatable stories spanning years and continents, Happiness is as moving as it is intellectually compelling in its investigation of such disparate topics as the effect of trauma on an individual and the ever shifting interaction between nature and the urban setting.