This book is the “One Book One Community” pick for my local library this year and is the story of a family frantically searching for their missing father, told from the perspective of his 20-year-old daughter, Mia. From the opening sentence, “We didn’t call the police right away” I was gripped with Kim’s novel and Mia’s storytelling.
I found this book to be very readable and hard to put down, and specifically catered to my literary and personal interests. First of all, done well I enjoy stream of consciousness, and Mia is a fun character to have in the driver seat. She is smart, irreverent and curious and I enjoy hearing her tell the tale. She uses footnotes to try to reel in her asides and ramblings (and tells the reader to ignore if you want) which is a feature in my own writing, so I found it charming and fun.
Also, this book has some plot points that, and I don’t think it spoils to mention as the title is “Happiness” feature work in happiness pop psychology which I find very fascinationg, as a listener of the podcast The Happiness Lab so Kim essentially ticked down a checklist of “things Ashlie would like to read about in a book.”
Buuuut if you don’t think you’d like a book that sounds like it was written by an intelligent and verbose 20-year-old, eager to follow her brain down whatever rabbit trail it finds, then this book might not be for you. But for me, it was near perfect. I did find it a little wobbly on the final dismount, but that might have been the author’s entire point, as this book is sort of a meta-commentary on missing persons stories, and what we find mesmerizing about them, and how we’d like to play out.
As Mia says, “The bigger and broader the mystery, the deeper the satisfaction when it’s resolved (a variation on Dad’s low baseline theory). They turn the pages and join the search party, to accelerate the process of solving the puzzle, of turning it into a different kind of story.”
All in all, I’m excited that my local library branch picked this book for the “one community” read and that I get to discuss it in person (in an hour and a half) with my book club buds, and that I’ll have the opportunity to attend an author event where I’ll get to hear from Angie Kim, live and in person!