Secrets to Happiness: A Novel

by Sarah Dunn

The central plot is a contemporary twist on Woody Allen's film Manhattan, with the genders reversed: a woman who is involved with a much younger man falls in love with her married friend's lover. The central character - Holly Frick - has just got divorced, published a distastrous novel, and has been forced to go back to television writing with her gay writing partner, Richard, who is on a self-destructive binge. Holly is Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, if Emma had lived in a time and place where married women spoke openly about their lovers, where gay men ordered partners on the Internet, and where answering machines and emails were the locus of romantic miscommunication instead of elegant hand-delivered notes. Like Emma, Holly gets involved in other people's romantic tangles, and she does so armed with unwavering moral certainty. And, like Emma, she's often completely off the mark!

• ISBN10: 0316013587
• ISBN13: 9780316013581
• Publish Date: 25 March 2009
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Little Brown and Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 277
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

Holly Frick just went through the worst kind of divorce: the one where you’re still in love with the person divorcing you. Facing up to life on her own, she needs a distraction to keep her mind off her own non-existent love life. Like Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, Holly is intimately involved in the lives of those closest to her, and now she feels compelled to give advice with unwavering moral certainty. And, like Emma, she is often completely off the mark. Soon she’s in over her head, advising her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend while at the same time falling for her married friend’s new lover. Until, happiness arrives from a very unexpected source …With a contemporary twist on Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Secrets to Happiness is a hilarious look at the things people will do to be happy.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to read Secrets To Happiness by Sarah Dunn. The American cover shows a dog lying on its back in grass and as soon as I saw it I fell in love and wanted to read the book. Thankfully for me the book was released in the UK in November and despite a different cover (a really horrible one, actually), I was thrilled to receive a copy to review. Unfortunately, the cover is the only good thing about the book.

I’ve been thinking for quite a few hours how to go about writing my review for the book because, frankly, I just didn’t like it. At all. So I’m going to keep it as short and sweet as I can possibly manage. Firstly the book wasn’t what I was expecting, at all. I was expecting a story about a girl falling in love with a dog, but the fact of the matter is, the dog in question barely even features. And, even worse, I don’t truly know what the book was about. It begins well enough, introducing us to Holly, but after that it just all goes wrong. The narrative moves all over the place – it focuses on Holly, on her best friend Amanda, on her ex-ex-boyfriend Spencer, on her writing partner Conrad and it all just seems muddled up.

There’s nothing that ties them all together, not really. It’s just a jumble of narratives stuck together in the hope of making a story, but for the most part, I had no idea what was going on. There was just no focus whatsoever, and it might just be me – this book could be some sort of literary masterpiece, but I just want a story I can make sense of and Secrets To Happiness is not such a book and I ended up skimming the last half of the book in a desperate bid to ‘finish’ it. Although, to be honest, to finish a book you have to have a satisfactory beginning, middle, and end and I got nothing.

Basically, this book just didn’t work for me. I didn’t care for the characters, I found them vapid and annoying, I couldn’t make sense of the story and I just wanted it to end. I had such high hopes for the book, and most of them came from the very misleading book cover and I feel a bit cheated, actually. I get that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but a book cover should at least represent the book it covers. So no, I wouldn’t recommend Secrets To Happiness, not unless you like a book that leaves you incredibly confused.