Secrets to Happiness

Ahhh, this is just the novel if you've been in a fairly heavy rotation of depressing books. Sara Dunn's book is what Good Grief by Lolly Winston wanted to be. The characters are great, the story is light enough to be fun without being condescending and you get inside the heads of all kinds of people. The story is ostensibly about Holly Frick, the author of a long-remaindered book with the embarrassing title Hello, Mr. Heartache. She's also the author, or at least contributor, to a few remaindered relationships, including a somewhat recent divorce. So, yeah, this is a relationship book, but don't even begin guessing who ends up with whom in the end because it's not as straight-forward as a Jane Austen.

Along with Holly, we meet her best friend by default, Amanda, Amanda's slipper-footed, sleepy husband, an arrogant, hamburger-eating Buddhist named Jack, an ex-, ex-boyfriend with mother issues (but not the kind that freak you out as a reader, necessarily), an overweight gym employee, a lost single woman named Betsy who is everything you'd expect from the name, but with more depth than you thought (also she went to my husband's alma mater. It's always nice when the little schools get a shout out). There are a few other fringe characters, including an over-medicated gay TV writer, a vet, and a dog with a brain tumor. I'm probably missing a few , but it's not confusing to keep them straight. It's all fun as they navigate their NYC world, fall in and out of relationships, and find out what other people really think of them. I love the ambiguous ending because even when I read light stuff, I don't necessarily want the happy ending spelled out for me. This book is more like life where everything is ongoing even if it doesn't have all the heavy lifting of our own boring little existences.

I recommended this to friend Denise who was recently lamenting that every book seems to be about people being miserable. Since she is the one who introduced me to Sarah Dunn through The Big Love (which I don't remember much, but in my defense it was years ago), I was happy to pass this on to her. Any misery is short-lived in Sarah Dunn's books.