by Angie Kim ★★★★☆
2023 is turning out to be a year chock full of follow-up efforts from authors who have previously placed books on my annual "Best Books of the Year" lists. S.A. Cosby, J.S. Dewes, Jane Harper, Saraa El-Arifi, TJ Klune, Christie Tate, William Landay, Don Winslow, Ashley Audrain, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Angeline Boulley...goodness, there have been a lot! In some cases (Cosby, Dewes, Harper), 2023's offerings have been as good or even better than previous works. But more often than not, it seems that this year's books have failed to live up to high expectations. Sadly, I can count Angie Kim's Happiness Falls in that latter category, as one that didn't capture the same magic as her debut (and my #2 book of 2019) Miracle Creek.
First, the cast of characters. Our narrator is Mia Parkson (age 20), daughter to Adam Parson and Hannah Park, twin sister to John, and older sister to Eugene (age 14). Eugene is, in many ways, the central character of the novel. He has a "rare genetic disorder called mosaic Angelman syndrome (AS), which means he can't talk, has motor difficulties, and...has an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter". Eugene spends considerable time at Henry's House, a therapy center, but he spends every morning with his father Adam, who swapped roles with Hannah several years prior to be Eugene's primary caregiver.
Like Miracle Creek, the story is set in eastern Virginia, this time at the height of the pandemic in June 2020. Adam and Eugene spend most mornings at the nearby River Falls Park, and the novel opens on one such day. After they leave around 9:30, Eugene comes sprinting home less than two hours later. There's a problem, though -- he's without his father.
What follows is the gradual path to uncovering the truth behind Adam's disappearance. Eugene, of course, likely knows the answer, but because he can't speak or write, he can't communicate to anyone what has happened. Mia, John, and their mother (along with the police) work to track down clues recovered from Adam's backpack, which was found in the river, and files on Adam's computer. Before long, they come to realize that there were several things that Adam was hiding from his family, and the possibilities for what happened to Adam grow rather than shrink.
I enjoyed Kim's writing once again, and there are some really smart things she does in the novel. Primary among those is the way she uses both Hannah's and Mia's experiences not being fluent in the language of the land in which they were living (Hannah when she first immigrated to the US; Mia for a period of time the family moved back to Korea) as a juxtaposition to what Eugene might be experiencing as a non-speaker. In one passage, Hannah says the following about her early days coming to the U.S. from Korea:
"...that's nowhere close to when people judge you, when you know people think you're stupid. I remember yelling at myself for feeling this way, telling myself it's in my head, no one actually thinks I'm stupid. But when I learned enough English that I could understand it, I found out I wasn't paranoid, after all; people really did look down on me. Because when you can't talk, people assume you can't understand and talk about you in front of you. It's humiliating."
It's really smart, and it broadens the relatability of a topic that a reader could mistakenly feel only pertains to a very small percentage of the population with similar conditions to Eugene's.
Despite the layered examination of the ways in which speech limitations transform a person's experience of society (and, unfortunately, society's general opinion of them), and what I thought was a really compelling setup for the story, there were also components that missed the mark for me. Mia, as a narrator, generally got on my nerves. She gets sidetracked and goes on tangents, so much so that she pushes her tangential thoughts to footnotes. That made me wonder if this was intentionally done from the start by Kim, or if an editor was bothered like me to the point that the footnotes were suggested. Mia also draws really unlikely conclusions; I can't provide examples without spoiling the story, but suffice it to say that I don't think any reasonable reader would agree with some of her deductions throughout the story. When she gets worked up and rails against her father for things he clearly didn't do, I couldn't help but roll my eyes.
Lastly -- and I feel like I can say this without spoiling anything -- the central mystery is only somewhat resolved. More than many, I am often okay with that type of ambiguity (my sister is still mad at me for recommending Tana French's In The Woods, which leaves you guessing a bit at the end). Kim actually broaches the topic in the book. With around 100 pages remaining, Mia says the following:
"A horrible idea occurred to me. What if we never find the answer? I hate leaving puzzles incomplete, cannot stand equations I can't solve, get infuriated by those giving-audience-agency stories without definitive answers -- The Little Prince (Dad's favorite book and thus the first of these types of books I ever read), Dad's old Choose Your Own Adventure books, the Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch" with its over one million variations, Life of Pi, Inception, The Sopranos's ending."
Given Mia's -- our narrator's -- aversion to the unresolved, that passage made me think, "okay, there's no way that they don't fully tie up the details here". Even more, I was hoping for a shocking reveal. But instead the reader is presented a plausible scenario and then left to draw their own conclusions with most of the information.
Overall, the story moved along, and despite some of the components that bothered me, I still mostly enjoyed it. Interestingly, one of the topics explored in Happiness Falls is how happiness is tied to expectations, and how inflated expectations prevent one from achieving maximum happiness. Given how much I enjoyed Miracle Creek and how intrigued I was by the premise of Happiness Falls, my expectations were quite high for this one. Unfortunately, that -- and this just not being as good of a book as Kim's first -- diminished my overall happiness with this read. If you're choosing only one Angie Kim novel, definitely choose Miracle Creek; and if you pick up Happiness Falls, keep those expectations in check. Maybe you'll end up happier with it than me.