Reviews with content warning for Rape - Happiness Falls

The book starts of with a cliché (a witness that cannot speak), but do not worry and stick with it, it's handled very well. I really appreciated the author's sensitive and thoughful portrayal of nonspeaking characters. It's clear that she researched and spoke to people who are nonspeaking themselves about it. This care is also evident in the author's notes and acknowledgments.

The main character shows some bad behavious: making quick assumptions, speaking around a nonspeaking character instead of to them, and just acting as a general teenager. However, the future main character, whose POV we're following, calls her past self out on it and voices her shame. In general I feel like Mia would've made more sense as a teenager than someone in college/uni.

The author's background in philosophy shines through, especially in the exploration of happiness. It's clearly written by someone with an academic background.

The ending left a positive lasting impression. I'm sure I will think back on it often during the rest of my life.

The reason that I'm giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 is because the writer POV often annoyed me with her perspective. I specifically refer to all the moments which said something along the lines of "but with the information I know now, why [odd thing] happened made sense" without any further explanation. It happened too much and sometimes for relatively minor occurrences. It disrupted the flow of the story and was hard to take serious after a while. A small point that I disliked but not enough to affect the score, that only Mia, Adam (the dad) and Eugene were well rounded characters. Hannah (the mother) and especially John were quite flat eventhough they were very important to the story.

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gurpreetlally's review

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mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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jocelyn62013's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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ncamp214's review

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reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I am so disappointed in this book. I absolutely loved the beginning. I was pulled in right away, hoping to have a mystery/thriller about what happened to Adam Parson and how Eugene could save the day despite being non-verbal. The book slowly dissolved into a plot with a lot of threads that never seemed to connect. Mia, the narrator, is extremely unlikeable and untrustworthy. Her extra thoughts in the footnotes took me out of the story and were more often than not unrelated. I was really hoping for a big reveal or satisfying ended, but the author didn't give us that. It was ambiguous, which I *think* was the point?

After reading the acknowledgements I was FLOORED that she choose to write a book about a debunked method of communication called FC. While I am not well researched in the Autism or non-speaking communities, from I have read, writing a book on this topic seems to be at best irresponsible.

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arayo's review

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challenging emotional informative mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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astoriareader's review

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emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

SYNOPSIS

One morning, Adam goes missing. Adam took Eugene, his teenage son with a dual diagnosis of autism and Angelman’s syndrome, to the park, and Adam never returned home. Rather, Eugene returned home by himself, and he’s in a bit of an unusual state. Due to Eugene’s condition, he is nonverbal, and he has some motor difficulties as well. Thus, the family cannot simply ask what happened.
The remainder of the Korean American family consists of two college-aged twins, Mia and John, and the mother/wife.
What happened to Adam? Did Eugene have anything to do with it?

MY THOUGHTS

This was pretty good overall.
It is told from Mia’s perspective, which I enjoyed.
This felt less like a thriller to me, and it was more a thought-provoking, contemporary fiction & about family. All the family members slowly start to really understand each other.
There were some parts that dragged a bit, and in my opinion, it could’ve been trimmed down a bit.
I enjoyed how the book challenges readers to defy the notion that lack of verbal communication skills means someone is not intelligent. I liked seeing a nonverbal character, Eugene, shown to have so much more to him than the world, including his own family, has given him credit for over the last 14 years.

TL;DR: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️worthwhile read & a great one to discuss with others.

Thanks to Random House Publishing and Netgalley for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book is out now.

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seventhswan's review

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reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.75

This book honestly hurt to read. It gets one thing right - that disabled people, including people with intellectual disabilities and nonspeaking people, invariably have thoughts, feelings, and opinions that matter and shouldn't be discounted. If the story had consisted of Eugene learning to use another form of AAC, I'd have no issue with it - but Facilitated Communication is harmful pseudoscience. As soon as I realised that was where this story was going I was hugely put off.

Otherwise, the narrator, Mia, is insufferable, her brother and mother are two-dimensional, and there are so many random plot points that are mentioned once and are never relevant again. There is a totally inexplicable paragraph about the rape of children during war. The criminal justice system works the same way it does in Law and Order. The narrative voice felt very YA despite this being, as far as I can tell, intended as adult fiction.

I almost never leave a 1* review because it feels unkind and I don't usually finish books I seriously dislike. But after seeing this book promoted so heavily on Goodreads and elsewhere I felt I had to provide a different perspective.

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katiecentabar's review against another edition

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emotional funny informative inspiring medium-paced

Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

A powerful story of what it means to be human and to be (mis)understood. Mia is a know-it-all who is so annoyingly 20 years old it was at times painful to read because I saw too much of myself in her, but she was a great narrator. This book is going to stick with me for a while, thinking about how we communicate and what it means to be happy.

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