Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
Happy & You Know It was a book that’s outside of my usual reading comfort zone—I’m not usually a realistic fiction person, and it seemed literary, though it didn’t end up being very much so. Either way, the premise was enough to grab me out of my sci-fi/fantasy stint, and though it wasn’t executed the way I wanted it to be, Happy & You Know It was still a biting and entertaining piece of satire.
Enjoy this week’s review!
Happy and You Know It – Laura Hankin
Claire Martin has been unceremoniously thrown into the lowest point in her life. After her band, Vagabond, replaces her and rockets to stardom not long after, she’s left with fewer and fewer options to keep a job—and pay the rent in New York City. But when the opportunity presents itself to become a playgroup musician for a cohort of rich, Manhattan moms, Claire jumps at the chance—she’ll be paid for music again, even if it’s just singing nursery rhymes, and they’ll surely pay her exorbitantly. Claire is thrust into a world of mommy influencers, babies that are too well-dressed for their own good, and a multitude of secrets. This playgroup isn’t what it seems—and Claire may have been sucked into their whirlwind of lies too late…
TW/CW: substance abuse, cheating/affairs
Given the first page, I was expecting for Happy & You Know It to be a wilder ride than it actually was, but that’s not to say that it was a bad novel. Though I feel like the plot didn’t reach its full potential, it was still a fantastic piece of satire—biting, timely, and hilarious at all the right times.
The gauntlet you always have to run when writing satire—or any genre, honestly—that’s somehow involved with social media is making it sound realistic. Too often, authors heavily force a hand of making sure the characters use all of the right slang and terminology, and end up falling headfirst into what looks like a boomer’s distorted vision of the internet and how it operates. I was bracing myself for Happy & You Know It to have some of those trappings, but thankfully, none of that was to be found! Hankin’s depiction of this inner circle of rich, Manhattan mommy influencers felt scarily true to how such figures act, from the curation of every little aspect of their lives down to the tone-deaf, over-the-top names for their babies. It was ridiculous, but that was precisely the point—those kinds of influencers who treat their growing babies like playthings for them to dress up so they can get more likes is ridiculous, and Hankin clearly understood how twisted it gets when these behaviors are pushed to the extreme.
Claire was a perfect protagonist for Happy & You Know It: an outsider who is morbidly enchanted by this world of kale smoothies and sponsorships, but is so desperate that she falls in too deep just when she realizes how right her instincts were about the morbid part. Hankin did a fantastic job of detailing all of her motivations—given the care that was put into crafting her extensive backstory with her former band and the constant, emotional reminders she gets from their stardom, almost all of what she did made sense. She’s just the kind of person who thinks that she’s smart enough to run from a dangerous situation, but cornered enough to convince herself that she can make it out unscathed. I almost with that this novel was entirely from her perspective, and we didn’t get the POV shifts from most of the playgroup mom—I guess we wouldn’t have explicitly seen the details about Whitney and Christopher’s affair, but I’m sure there’s a way that it could have been revealed. The less we knew about the moms, I think, the better.
Perhaps that was part of what made the initial reveal about the true nature of the TrueMommy supplements (no spoilers) fall slightly flat—part of it may have been that it was a bit predictable, but part of it was that we knew too much about the rest of the moms. By the time that this reveal kicks in past the halfway point, my Spider-sense was already tingling—too much for how far into the novel it was. This amount of time should’ve been enough to ramp up the suspense, but I feel like I saw too much into their heads, and therefore, had a good guess of what the first twist was going to be. Especially since we only got some of the moms’ perspectives (Whitney, Gwen, and Amara), I feel like the balance was off. With Claire as an “outsider looking in” protagonist, it would have worked so much better if that secrecy was also confined to her POV—and nailed in that feel of the novel.
On that subject, given how gloriously over-the-top the introduction was, I expected the culmination of said twist to be a lot more dramatic than it was. It looked so messy from the start, and yet the ending felt wrapped up far too neatly—just a moment of confrontation, and then a time skip where everyone is (mostly) living happily ever after in wake of this supposedly drastic revelation. The one red herring we sort of got felt too obvious, and so it was easy to point to the real perpetrator, which dampened the effect. The setup didn’t match the end result—I guess I did want more of a disastrous downfall for almost all parties involved (can you tell I like Fargo?), but if you specifically have an introduction to hint at some spectacle of corruption and ruin, it needs to deliver—and unfortunately, Happy & You Know It missed the mark on that front.
All in all, a slightly disappointing mystery, but a deeply fulfilling and sharp satire. 3.5 stars!
Happy & You Know It is a standalone, but Laura Hankin is also the author of The Daydreams, A Special Place for Women, and the forthcoming One-Star Romance.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 