Hogarth | Book Chatter

Happiness Falls
By Angie Kim
Hogarth, 9780593448205, August 2023, 400 pp.

The Short of It:

Unfortunately, this one didn’t pull me in.

The Rest of It:

It started off very strong. A close-knit family with a special needs son. A brother, a sister and mom and dad. All, trying hard to find some way to communicate with fourteen year old Eugene after he returns home in a panicked state without his father.

What happened? Calls are immediately made but go unanswered. What about their possessions? Eugene is completely unable to provide an explanation.

The family immediately contacts the police. Was there an accident? After some preliminary search some items are found but in water and damaged. How did it get to the bottom of a stream? What about the notebook they found with the words Happiness Quotient? What was dad working on?

The author does a good job of presenting enough information to keep it interesting. But the communication research that takes place in preparation to communicate with Eugene pulled me out of the story.

There are cause and effect charts, and just a lot of small findings that lead up to the surprising conclusion. I felt that the story lost its way mid-point. The family’s frustration and their inability to really get along make it a tense reading experience.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Barrowfields
By Phillip Lewis
Hogarth Press, Hardcover, 9780451495648, March 2017, 368pp.

The Short of It:

A father and son story but really a story about family relationships and what it means to come home.

The Rest of It:

Henry Aster’s father returns to the small Appalachian town where he grew up and moves his family into a house with a past. The dark, immense home was once the scene of a grisly murder involving young children. Its looming presence foreshadowing the unraveling of the family to come.

From the description it sounds like a ghost story and maybe it is but not the kind you’d be expecting. This story focuses on the relationship between father and son, missed-opportunities, and at its heart, how we process grief and loss.

After a terrible loss, Henry’s father, a brilliant man trying to reinvent himself as a writer, struggles with what he’s been dealt. The entire family struggles with him but in different ways. Instead of coming together, they push each other away and it’s incredibly heartbreaking to witness.

There is a lot of good to be had in this novel. The writing is lovely but the Asters are readers so there are plenty of literary references that I jotted down. I love when books mention other books. But what I really loved was the slow build of what eventually causes the family to fall apart. There is a lot of tension in this novel which made the page turns go that much faster.

However, one section of the novel strayed from the main story which seemed a little out of left field but I was very happy to see how it fit into the story as a whole once I got to the end of the book. The final pages are gold. I reread them many times and loved them to pieces.

One of my favorite books of all time is A Separate Peace by John Knowles and although The Barrowfields is nothing like that book in story, the “coming-of-age” aspect of this novel reminds me a lot of A Separate Peace and yes, maybe even the main character reminds me of it, too.

I say, read it.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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