Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024--San Antonio

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim is a story told by the college student female of a mixed-race family who is back at home because COVID has led to remote learning.  I almost quit reading the book because I became so frustrated by this character.  She is very intelligent when it comes to knowledge, but she is scatterbrained when it comes to applying that knowledge through reasoning.  She is so quick to make the wrong conclusions with the information she has--even to the point of ignoring what should be considered major factors she knows.  This book is a story of the disappearance of the father.  The only person with him at the time of the disappearance is a younger teenage son who is autistic, has angelman syndrome (where a person constantly looks as if they are smiling, and cannot speak verbally.  The police officer comes on strong thinking that the son has probably killed the father in a fight and wants to put the boy in detention.  The whole situation is a mess.  As time passes and the story unfolds, secrets are learned.  Plus there are long sections of the book with details from the father's notebook regarding his thinking and experiments in trying to analyze and develop a happiness quotient measurement tool--details that become boring to keep reading.  The strange thing to me is that this book is so popular that I had to wait 9 weeks with it on hold at the library before I could get it--longer than I have ever had to wait for a book before.  What a disappointment after all that waiting to find that it was a book I could have skipped.  I gave it 3 stars out of 5.