Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - Happiness Falls

Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

83 reviews

oceanwriter's review against another edition

emotional informative 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

3.75

I was super drawn to books about Asian American families last year and this fit the bill perfectly. It turned out to be even more than I’d expected featuring a non-verbal autistic character. I have twin cousins similar to Eugene, so it was like getting a closer glimpse into what a day might look like from their perspective.

When Adam Parson doesn’t come home with his son, Eugene, his family desperately searches for answers. It seems as though only Eugene has the answer, but given he doesn’t speak, his mother, siblings, and the detective working on the case can’t hear his side of the story. Unfortunately, given Eugene’s history of outbursts along with some scattered bits of evidence, he is made a suspect.

The story is narrated by Mia, Eugene’s older sister. She helps to decode her father’s journal which is the family’s best lead they have to finding out what happened. In their findings, several different scenarios are compiled.

I was more interested in Eugene’s storyline than I was in the overall mystery, though it did have its intriguing moments. Though ultimately important to the plot, I grew bored whenever there were readings from Adam’s journal. Some parts of the story felt unnecessary while others felt unresolved, but for the most part, I had a good time reading.

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katbalts's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad 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

4.5

This one felt extremely meaningful to me because I have two family members who are non speaking. I think Angie Kim does a really brilliant job at creating an extremely realistic family dynamic. I loved the characters, I loved the mystery, I loved the philosophy of this book. Really amazing and very special gem of a book.

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jaimc's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.5

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alexisgarcia's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

3.5

the more i think about this book, the less i like it. i think i like the premise and this was a book i couldn’t really put down. but the writing was definitely pretty clunky and the narrator was pretty irritating. there were a ton of aspects of the characters and plot that didn’t get flushed out. none of the characters felt well-rounded and almost all of them were incredibly unlikable.

also i hated the ending. i think it’s hard for authors to get away with an unresolved ending, and this one definitely did not get away with it. also i wasn’t willing to believe that they had no clue that Eugene could spell or have any intelligible thoughts at all. how do you spend all day and night with him without getting an inkling about it. at that point it just feels like blatant negligence and abuse.

there were also so many parts of the plot that were convoluted and pretentious. idk, i did like a lot of this but there was also a lot that disappointed me too. also, i am BEGGING authors to stop putting covid in the background of their books when that is not apart of the main plot at all.

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emma_sky's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

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

3.5

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_david_'s review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad 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? It's complicated

4.0

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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loribree83's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring 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

5.0

This book is fantastic. I almost skipped it. I didn't love Miracle Creek. But then when I heard more about the book, I had a feeling I would love it! This book is marketed as a mystery/thriller--and while a mystery is the crux of the plot, this isn't a typical mystery or thriller, and if you go in expecting that, you will be disappointed (which I think explains a lot of the negative reviews). There are so many layers to this story, and so much depth. The plot moves slower than a typical mystery, because it's filled with so much information that's relevant to the story. While I certainly cared about the mystery and what happened to Mia's dad, I also fell in love with the family at the center of this story. I loved Mia as a narrator, and her voice and narrative throughout the book felt very logical in my brain. My undergrad was in psychology so I found so much of the book absolutely fascinating.

"Now, in the olden days--before we knew about different parts of the brain and neurons and all that--we considered a person's speech and intelligence to bed directly related; in fact, the word dumb in Old Englsih means mute or without speech. We now know that's not true, but it seems to be a deep prejudice that won't go away. even to this day, if you can't talk, people automatically jump to the assumption that it's a cognitive problem: you're 'dumb' in every sense of the word, Angeli said, using air quotes, her voice taking on a passionate, almost evangelistic tone. 'It's incomprehensible, the complete opposite of what we should do, but we presume incompetence unless proven otherwise, unless you're someone like Stephen Hawking who lost his ability to speak after the world already knew he was brilliant."

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juliana18's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense

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? 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 against another edition

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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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