Secrets to Happiness: A Novel

by Sarah Dunn

Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life -- with Holly's ex!

Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting thirtyish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana.

From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal -- and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be happy.

• ISBN10: 0316013609
• ISBN13: 9780316013604
• Publish Date: 2 July 2010 (first published 25 March 2009)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Little, Brown & Company
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 304
• 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.