Happiness Falls by Angie Kim ~ Book Review

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Mystery

There are so many layers to this book. It starts off with a missing person. Mia’s father, Adam, fails to return from a walk with her younger brother, Eugene, who is nonverbal. The family begins to work together to try to uncover anything hinting at Adam’s whereabouts.

As they go through his things, they find notebooks indicating that Adam was fascinated by the psychology behind happiness, and determining ‘happiness quotients.’ This took up a large portion of the book, and honestly, there were whole sections I kind of skimmed. I found the science interesting to an extent, but it didn’t feel like it was moving the story along.

The other big focus of the book is on Eugene and how he was misunderstood as someone with autism and Angelman syndrome. It goes in depth about the different types of teaching and learning they have explored to try to help Eugene communicate. The research that must have gone into this narrative was tremendous and it painted a really powerful picture of the difficulty and frustration Eugene, and others like him, deal with.

Each piece of this book was interesting on its own, but as a whole, it felt like too many BIG THINGS to fit into one book. Together, they bogged the narrative down somewhat and made it feel slow.

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