A review by rachels_booknook
A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey

4.5

Advanced Book Review! Thank you @kristywharvey, @uplitreads, @gallerybooks & @netgalley for sending me this book for review. Opinions are my own. 

“A young woman discovers the family she has always longed for when she spends a life-changing summer in North Carolina.” 

When Keaton goes back to her mother’s childhood home in the town of Beaufort, North Carolina to prepare the house to sell she doesn’t expect to find a house frozen in the 1970’s. After Keaton’s grandparents’ tragic deaths in 1976, Keaton’s mother and uncle never returned to their family house. The book alternates between Keaton’s life in the present and her grandmother, Becks’, almost fifty years earlier. What Keaton finds there will change her life forever. 

I loved this book. I love the concept of finding this house, stuck in the past, like a time warp. Kristy Woodson Harvey says this part is based on a true story. I love the descriptions of the house that Keaton calls “a museum of the seventies.” 

Through Becks’ perspective, Keaton and the reader both learn about her wonderful life with Townsend, and some of the secrets that died with them. The reader is taken on a journey with Keaton, her brother, and the friends she makes in Beaufort, to try to find out what really happened to Becks and Townsend. 

I loved learning about Becks’ life in Beaufort in the 1970’s and the things she loved – her traditions, her committees, her parties. I really enjoyed reading about Keaton getting to know her grandmother through her journals and friends, and keeping Becks’ memory alive in harmonization with her own goals and aspirations, as she contends with her own next steps. 

Through it all, of course, is the romance plotline with her next-door neighbor and his adorable son. 

This might be my favourite book from Kristy Woodson Harvey yet.