This literary mystery by an award-winning author was unique and thought-provoking. Will YOU like Happiness Falls? Check out my review of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim with marked SPOILERS and the ending explained. Sort of. Join the discussion!
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Published on August 29, 2023 by Hogarth
I read this book in October 2023 and put it on my list of Best Nontraditional Mysteries of 2023!
Plot Summary for Happiness Falls
The lives of members of a tight-knit Korean-American family in Virginia are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.
Mia, the family’s irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything and wasn’t initially concerned when her father Adam and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park.
But by the time Eugene runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear to Mia her father is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has a rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.
As Mia and her family try to help the police piece together what happened to Adam, they also have to untangle a host of family secrets.
Review of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
What kind of a book is Happiness Falls?
My opinion? Happiness Falls is a “propulsive literary mystery.”
Since the narrator of Happiness Falls is a linguist, let’s unpack a new word being used to describe books these days: propulsive. (I think publishers slapped the “thriller” label on too many books, angry readers started to push back, and they had to invent a new all-purpose word.)
I’d describe a propulsive book as one that has a plot that drives the book forward. Thrillers are propulsive, but not all propulsive books are thrillers. Plot-driven books are propulsive, but not all propulsive books are plot-driven.
Happiness Falls is also a pandemic book that mostly takes place in June 2020.
What Other Books Are Similar to Happiness Falls?
One reviewer on Goodreads said that Happiness Falls reminded them of a Jodi Picoult book, and I can see that. What Happiness Falls and a book like Mad Honey have in common are that they both explore issues and are heavily thematic. Mad Honey uses bees, to explain … well, everything in the book. And Happiness Falls uses the science of happiness and the topic of language as frameworks to look at the Parkson family. I’d argue that Happiness Falls is a more intellectual version of a Jodi Picoult book.
Like the book, the Parksons also don’t fit into neat boxes. They are a Korean-American family. Hannah Park is Korean, while her husband Adam Parson is white. They have three “Parkson” children: Mia and John are twenty-year old fraternal twins. Eugene, fourteen, is on the autistic spectrum and also has Angelman syndrome, which gives him impaired coordination and an inability to speak.
One morning, Eugene and Adam go hiking, as they do every day. Hours later, Eugene returns, bloody and distraught, but unable to explain what happened to his father.
Is Happiness Falls Even a Mystery?
I think it is. However, Happiness Falls is a mystery hiding in a very cerebral and verbose first person narration. Some readers complain that Mia is a lot, and she is.
She can’t tell a story in a linear way. She will say “let me explain” and then go off on a long tangent. Her narration even has footnotes for the things that can’t be contained in the tangents. Yes, Happiness Falls is a mystery with footnotes!
But hidden in all that there are clues. There is also solid deductive reasoning, on the part of the family and the detective assigned to the case, with whom the family has a somewhat strained relationship. All the Parkson family members are unreliable narrators in their own ways.
Mia, in all her long-windedness (the book is 387 pages, but all her digressions and the footnotes do make it feel longer) does a good job of questioning how we approach new or puzzling information, talking about things like confirmation bias (that we tend to align new facts with our existing assumptions) and anchoring bias (that we give more credibility to the first pieces of information we get on a topic).
Did I Like Happiness Falls?
I did like Happiness Falls. Mia was not my favorite narrator, but she grew on me. I did wonder what the book would have been like if more of the characters had been given a narrative point of view, but that could have also spoiled the mystery. We do get the missing Adam’s point of view through his cryptic notes on the science of happiness.
Happiness Falls reminded me a little of one of my favorite plays, Proof, which was also made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Gweneth Paltrow. The play connects a scientific concept, a math proof, with its emotional equivalent: proof of love, trust and sanity.
Similarly, Happiness Falls looks at happiness (something trendy right now but which I think the book could have done without as I don’t think it added all that much to the story) and language. The book’s multi-faceted analysis of language and communication (or mis-communication) was really interesting.
You can read a Q and A with the author Angie Kim in which she discusses her inspirations!
Will You Like Happiness Falls? YES, if:
- You are open to a non-traditional mystery
- You don’t mind a plot with some interesting detours
- You are comfortable with ambiguity in a mystery
- You really enjoy stories with interesting family dynamics.
If you are a mystery reader who wants a straightforward narrative and a firm resolution, then possibly not.
Your opinion of Mia’s narration will also be a key part of your decision, so if you are deciding whether to purchase this one, you might want to check out a chapter or two and see what you think.
What Was the Ending of Happiness Falls?
What Happened to Adam Parkson?
Well, it’s hard to know 100%, but as the book ends, Eugene is able to testify using I-ASC (spelling words from a letterboard.)
Based on that, it seems fairly certain Adam died from a fall off a cliff near the waterfall where he and Eugene were having lunch. But…. how did Adam fall?
The day of Adam’s death, Eugene says he was bullied by a group of teens who called him a freak and a weirdo. Adam was upset and Eugene started screaming and lashing out at the boys.
A woman in the park saw this and made disparaging remarks about Eugene, upsetting him even more. She was somehow able to both record the incident AND pepper spray them. In the scuffle, Adam’s glasses got broken. Eugene then says he made up with his father, who recorded their talk in his notes.
After that, they continued to a waterfall to have lunch. But the gang of boys followed them, stealing Adam’s wallet from his backpack and then throwing the backpack toward the edge of the cliff.
Eugene says he lunged for the backpack and then his father grabbed his arm. They both lost their footing and then his father was gone.
What do the police think?
No one seems to want to charge Eugene with anything, but the police can’t find anything to corroborate his story. The woman who made the video didn’t see the gang of boys AND denied pepper spraying them.
The police then find ANOTHER video taken around the same time that seems to corroborate Eugene’s story except for the fact that the Parkson had access to that video before Eugene’s testimony. So the police wonder if the family concocted the story and fed it to Eugene to cover up the fact that he, in a fit of anger and frustration, pushed his father off the cliff.
Then, a written account by Adam of him making up with Eugene after the outburst is suddenly found in the shorts Eugene was wearing on the day his father died.
The police finally seem satisfied, but Mia A) is shocked that no one found this note in Eugene’s shorts until now and B) finds a sample of her father’s notes in the family photocopier, leading her to believe that either her brother or her mother or both fabricated this make-up note.
What do you think?
I’m not really sure what to think.
- Was Eugene really capable of conspiring with his mom and/or brother and then carrying out this cover-up?
- If so, why wasn’t Anjeli (Eugene’s communication therapist) presented as a possible accomplice as she was interpreting for him?
- Whatever happened, did Eugene intend to harm his father? To me, either scenario seems like a tragic accident.
I do think that either John or Hannah or both DID forge the note. Whether they believed Eugene’s story or not, I think they decided they couldn’t risk Eugene being jailed or institutionalized and decided to make the note just to be sure that didn’t happen.
Please give me your thoughts. I read and respond to all comments! Comments with spoilers are welcome so proceed with caution if you have NOT read the book and want to.