Are You Happy Now: 'One of the best novels of 2023' Sara Collins

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Oh my baby girl can finally find her mate!" My mom had tears of joy in her eyes. One could easily see that I was her favorite of the three of us. In second is the oldest, my brother Jacob, followed by my older sister Briella. Mom never really liked her after she found out about all the men she has slept with. My mom was a big believer in waiting for your mate, and so was I, and secretly Jake was also. Have people finally given up? Are they choosing to die? After a wedding in New York when a woman sits down in the middle of the dance floor and refuses to move, all over the country people start doing the same. Soon it’s a pandemic, with “catatonic events” happening worldwide.

That is a lot to digest! The message? Be authentic, and take responsibility for yourself. Not a bad message at all! In her introduction Berger tells us how this book came about – as an offshoot of her personal writing about what she needed to know to live her life in a better way. She was doing this to clear her own mind – the end result with her sharing this is that her readers have a way to clear their minds and lead a happier life!

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What a difficult book to categorize, rate, and review! Nothing feels straightforward with this read, including the plot, the character dynamics, and the characters themselves. I finished the read feeling thoroughly bewildered.

Jameson utiliza esta pandemia como reflexión de la vida de estrés y las presiones que todos ponemos a otros y a nosotros mismos por tener que hacer ciertas cosas vitales como parte fundamental de nuestra vida. I love the epilogue – “Don’t believe what you think.” We suffer because we believe what we think … and what we think is our own perception of what is. Let go of that perception, and we see the “what is’ for what it really is. He didn’t want to die, he just wanted to stop, to cease, sit down. Maybe just sleep, for a year or maybe forever.” The author asks us to question, if death is dangerous and if life is dangerous, in the last chapter. She wants us to examine these concepts for what they are. Is there proof death is dangerous? Could we liberate ourselves from fear of life if we did not fear death? A very valid point and one which is intrinsically examined here with preciseness and reasoning. The book ends with a Happy Life worksheet based on each chapter, where key points are presented and you are encouraged to write down and investigate the various parts of your life and examine for yourself things that are working and things that are not. This helps you see struggles more clearly and find the true path to your own unique happiness. “Are You Happy Now?” delivers fully with great depth, insight and invigoration. There is an tremendous amount of knowledge and information presented in this book. The language and concepts fit together with fluidity, efficiency and relevance. This book can not only help enhance your life and open your mind to seeing far beneath the surface – it can change your life as well! Phenomenal writing Barbara Berger! You have written a book of value, exploration and taken the concept of Happiness and fully helped people to understand what it is and how to be happy! After reading this book you WILL be asking yourself “ Are You Happy Now?” The writing is very easy to get into. It flowed nicely and wasn’t too high-brow. It still had some beautiful nuggets of prose, but it still read really well and kept me hooked throughout.A quietly crushing yet devastatingly tender work scintillating with insight and emotional intelligence. With acuity and empathy Hanna Jameson presents her readers with a captivating narrative chronicling four people’s attempts at happiness despite a looming health crisis: more and more people are literally sitting down and seemingly giving up on life. I'm aware this review is somewhat vague but I think this is a read best served without prior knowledge. He couldn’t forgive them, for being human, for not getting parenthood right the first time, for not raising him better able to deal with this. My initial impression of this book was that it was a very self indulgent story about publishing and Chicago, told by an old Chicago publisher. If I'm being honest, that impression never really went away. My initial take on the protagonist was that he was average with a superiority complex, selfish and largely irritating. That impression never really went away either. Firstly, I just want to say that I do not read pandemic books, it's too early for me but this isn't like anything we experienced in recent years, apart from how humans behave. Most people will feel safe reading this in my opinion. I'm not going to spoil the events this book is built around, but suffice it to say, it's a clever concept.

I went into this read blind and I almost think it’s the best way to read and experience this strange and unsettling dystopian narrative. It could be classed as pandemic fiction but you’ll soon realise the illness that is suddenly affecting clusters of the population (primarily young people) doesn’t seem to be infectious - but potentially a choice? A choice to sit down and give up on life as there’s no hope. I then shifted and ran over to the house. It felt really good to let my wolf out for a run. She had been so angry last time she shifted and now she was filled with nothing but contentment because we were finally fully mates - she was basically purring in delight. Wolves only purr when they are completely content and at ease. Throughout the novel, Jameson explores happiness, adulthood, loneliness, and connectedness. Her characters deal with failure, disappointment, and their own impotence, ‘smallness’, in the face of all that is going on in their world. I loved how many moments of vulnerability, kindness, and love we got. I also found myself relating very much with the many instances where characters are struggling to cope: with their own life, with their own unhappiness, and with taking accountability. Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin’s flaws and idiosyncrasies are what made them memorable and real. Although I am more of a Yun/Fin, Andrew had my heart. He was such a gem. His kindness, his alertness to other people's feelings, his selflessness…getting to know him was a delight.Yes!" I squealed. "I was hoping this would happen! I mean I thought about it happening when I first met Logan and he basically adopted me as his daughter. I just thought that you two would make such a good couple. But then I realized that my sperm donator still stood in the way and then just pushed the thought away. But then he was out of the picture and I thought about the pair of you again, but then I also thought Logan was dead but -" Logan covered my rambling mouth so I'd shut up. I gave him a sheepish smile, well I tried with his hand still covering my mouth. The premise is interesting, but this is entirely a novel which is centred around its characters. It’s a coming of age story in many ways, as much as a story about twenty and thirty somethings can be a coming of age story. Hanna Jameson’s Are You Happy Now follows two overlapping and imperfect love stories, both of which begin at the same time and place as a frightening worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s four protagonists – Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin – are present at a New York City wedding when one of the guests collapses without explanation. She is alive but unresponsive, appearing to have suddenly just ‘given up’ on living. Soon this mysterious ‘disease’ begins to spread, and we follow Jameson’s protagonists as they grapple with building new relationships whilst the world seemingly collapses around them.

That night they see something none of them can explain. Someone sits down, and simply gives up. Soon it's happening all around them. Is it an illness, or a decision? The main problem with his life-as-a-movie theory was that it wasn’t easy to apply to other people who weren’t the protagonists of his reality. What happened to everyone else? Emory couldn’t imagine what it felt like to inhabit space you truly owned. Cities were hostile to anyone who couldn’t count on the split rent and utilities of partnership. Being one person was more expensive than she had been taught to anticipate.” With an unknown disease, neither viral or bacterial, mass hysteria occurs when millions of people start shutting down. With no scientific reason and the government leaving them to come up with their own conclusion that "it wasn’t a virus. It was no longer a simple case of mass hysteria, it was now just a narrative, that too many people had accepted.” People are forced to carry on with their lives with the fear of the catatonia that seemed to be “something so vast it couldn’t be perceived with the eyes. It could only be felt, like an ache soul- deep.”

Customer reviews

Fin is probably the character I like the most, but damn, this book made me deal with some flawed (and in some cases unlikeable) characters. Which I don’t mind, but there was just not enough about Yun to let me like him or feel very sorry for him. And I feel like that should have been the case? I found that each chapter in this book was very well written, and brought it’s point home in a manner that the reader could accept, and that allowed them to take a look at themselves in a non-judgmental manner. This book acts as a mirror to who we are at the soul level. And she thought, Oh shit, I really like him. Oh shit, because it was never a good time to realize you really liked someone. Realizing you really liked someone meant knowing on some level it was going to hurt. However, I didn't particularly enjoy the story. The characters were 20-30 year olds living in New York city and we were witness to their thought processes, motivations and desires, but they mostly seemed selfish and unstable (although perhaps this was the point...) The book focused a great deal on their sexual relationships, which happened to be mostly gay or bisexual, much to the detriment of the main story. Progress was slow and it did unfortunately become rather tedious to read at times.