Happy Place

I like Emily Henry’s books, they’re not masterpieces, the highest score I’ve given any of her books is an 8/10 and they average lower, but they’ve never been offensibly bad. I started off with Beach Read and that title encapsulates the spirit of her books; they’re low stakes, comfy romances with a guaranteed happy ending that you could read whilst lying on the beach.

However, Happy Place feels like Emily Henry acknowledging that since the happy ending is a given, anything between the exposition and the resolution in her books is pointless. There is simply nothing happening, the characters are on holiday interacting in mostly meaningless ways that will neither progress relationships nor develop their characters. The story is told through alternating timelines, one of the present events of the group of friends being on holiday and one of the past events leading up to Harriet’s and Wyn’s breakup. The unfortunate result is that most of the rising actions take place in the flashbacks which makes the present timeline feel like a waste of time. With character development being mostly absent, this makes all characters imploding at one another at the 85% mark all the more jarring as they are promptly being rushed into a resolution and happy ending.

There is also something missing in Happy Place which Emily Henry’s previous books had: an additional non-relationship based story that mattered to the characters and help characterise them. In Beach Read, the protagonist’s main motivation was her deadline to write a book, whilst in Book Lovers the protagonist is truly passionate about her work as a literary agent. This isn’t the case here as all issues revolve around relationships and to add insult to injury, the entirety of the conflict arises from the most overused, dried out, boring and ridiculed trope: the characters refuse to talk openly to each other.

Finally, Harriet has such a complete lack of personality that her entire character revolves around making other people happy. She repeatedly refuses to express any sort of personal opinion nor does she ever take any proactive action because of a deep seated fear of her destroying her friends group. Instead, she believes that if she acts as the universe’s punching bag (i.e. she behaves as if everything was her fault and merrily takes on the blame for anything), then everything will be fine whilst being unable to see that that’s exactly why nobody likes her.

This bizarre choice of unlikeable character that you’re unfortunately stuck to as the reader is half heartedly justified by some parental expectations trauma. I am in no way belittling the impact that parental trauma can have which can have devastating consequences on someone’s mental health, but I seriously do not believe that the author gave the subject the development it needed to be taken seriously. Whilst I’m not asking for Colleen Hoover’s style of dedicating a full book to a specific type of trauma, Emily Henry’s approach here of resolving Harriet’s parental trauma in barely 2 and a half pages in the penultimate chapter does not help with taking this issue as something that was all that difficult for the character to get over.

Overall, it might seem like I’ve solely been bashing Happy Place with no redeeming features to speak of, but that’s not quite true. Happy Place should have been another 7 to 7.5/10 perfect comfort read even if it is not memorable but it’s just too boring and cliché this time around. This does not mean that it’s bad, as a true 5/10, if you’ve got nothing else to read it’s entertaining enough to pass the time and you still get a nice happy ending but it’s definitely not something I’d recommend you go out of your way to read.