Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
Book Feature - Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
Book Feature - Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
HBL Note: You know how much I love Reese Witherspoon’s book recommendations! So when the publicist for this book reached out to me about featuring Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After, I said yes immediately! This book is a memoir about the love between a man and a woman, and the daughter that tore them apart and then brought them back together with a grave illness. This book sounds both heart-wrenching and inspiring. I’m not sure I want to read this book before I have a baby of my own. It may scare me away from having a kid altogether.
Book Feature - Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
From the publisher:
Happiness begins with a charming courtship between hopelessly attracted opposites: Heather, a world-roaming California girl, and Brian, an intellectual, homebody writer, kind and slyly funny, but loath to leave his Upper West Side studio. Their magical interlude ends, full stop, when Heather becomes pregnant—Brian is sure he loves her, only he doesn't want kids. Heather returns to California to deliver their daughter alone, buoyed by family and friends. Mere hours after Gracie's arrival, Heather's bliss is interrupted when a nurse wakes her, "Get dressed, your baby is in trouble."
This is not how Heather had imagined new motherhood – alone, heartsick, an unexpectedly solo caretaker of a baby who smelled "like sliced apples and salted pretzels" but might be perilously ill. Brian reappears as Gracie's condition grows dire; together Heather and Brian have to decide what they are willing to risk to ensure their girl sees adulthood.
The grace and humor that ripple through Harpham's writing transform the dross of heartbreak and parental fears into a clear-eyed, warm-hearted view of the world. Profoundly moving and subtly written, Happiness radiates in many directions--new, romantic love; gratitude for a beautiful, inscrutable world; deep, abiding friendship; the passion a parent has for a child; and the many unlikely ways to build a family. Ultimately it's a story about love and happiness, in their many crooked configurations.
Book Feature - Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After
