First of all: representation. There are multiple issues that are represented in Happiness Falls. The main thing, which affects most of the plot, is disability. The main character’s little brother, Eugene, has both Autism and Angelman Syndrome. He cannot speak and it was difficult for him to communicate and properly show his emotions at first. I like how he was represented because he was never a punchline or a joke, he was shown with dignity and respect that is often not given to characters with a disability. There is a problem that I will talk about later, but I don’t think it’s a problem with representation, but more of a problem with characterization.
There is also talk about racism — mainly shown through micro-agressions. Mia is the main character, and she and her siblings are half Korean and half White. She and her twin brother John look very different, she takes after her Korean mother while he takes after their American father. It is shown that they’re both treated differently because of their appearance, even though they are both of the same race.
This is shown mainly through language. When they are young, John and Mia move to Korea. They both can’t speak Korean very well, but they are treated very differently by their Korean peers because of how they look. Mia is treated like an idiot, because she looks Korean and therefore was expected to know the language. John’s lack of Korean skill was always excused, and he was treated with more leniency because they didn’t expect a “White” child to speak Korean perfectly. In the biracial community, people often talk about never fitting in. For example a person who is half White and half Black always feels too Black when they enter a group of White people, but they also feel too White when they enter a group of Black people. I just haven’t read about this phenomenon in the context of language before, and I greatly appreciated it.
Mia and John have a Korean mother — Hannah —, and she also talked about how she felt put down by American people because of her English skills. She is a very smart woman, but because at first she couldn’t perfectly articulate herself in a foreign language, it was just assumed that she wasn’t smart at all. This is also a very common thing that happens to non-English speakers, since there seems to be a strange pressure for us to just know English perfectly because it’s the “international language”. As an European, I haven’t felt the extent of this like people of colour have, but I do think that many English speakers find it way too easy to put people down for speaking with an accent or using the wrong grammar. Just attempting to learn a second language is hard, but when it comes to English it feels like it’s just expected of us — no matter country, age, and social background. And if we don’t do it perfectly we must be less than.
The exploration of language and culture was a very nice addition to the conversation, especially since language does play a large role in the lives of many nonspeaking disabled people.
The plot was quite good as well, you learn a lot of information slowly and it’s quite fun to make up your own theories about what happened as you go on. There are many different routes the story can go down, and the ending is open so as you leave the book behind you can still think back to it and try to figure out what really happened.
When Mia goes through her father’s computer and found multiple files with the letters HQ, I was quite worried that it stood for something like “Headquarter”, and I hoped that it wouldn’t go to the underground organization route like, for example, Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. I personally wouldn’t have liked this, since these stories don’t seem as ambitious now, and I was glad that it didn’t go down this route. But, the route it did go down to wasn’t satisfactory either. HQ stood for “Happiness Quotient", a theory about happiness that the father made up. After he goes missing, his HQ notebook is discovered and we are slowly given pages of his writings, which basically explained his theory and summarized some of his experiments.
These pages were way too long, they did kind of play a role in the story since they caused the family to make another theory about what could have happened to cause the father — Adam — to go missing. But, I think they could have been shorter, since they were mainly scientific drivel that repeated points constantly. Everything they meant and stated could have been summarized in a single page or less.
We also get retellings of the past, but most of them aren’t really that important and they only work to try and build up some backstory. I have a problem with one of them: on Mia and John’s birthday, Eugene begins destroying their cakes. Eventually, he ends up in the hospital and it’s discovered that he had Ulcerative Colitis, and eating sugary things caused him pain, which was why he destroyed their cakes — to protect them. This is a good moment; it shows that Eugene has his ways of communicating that might seem violent or like throwing a tantrum, but the reason I didn’t like it is because the family didn’t really learn anything from it.
Which brings me to the main problem: how they treated Eugene. He was fourteen when the main storyline happened, but they still babied him. Even though there was so much evidence that he was smarter than they thought, that he wanted to find ways to communicate but just couldn’t because of his disability. They only begin to respect Eugene when they find out Adam secretly brought him to therapy sessions that taught him how to communicate using spelling on a letterboard. The family finds out that Eugene didn’t like being treated like a baby, or an idiot, but I found that that was already quite obvious before. He was clearly intelligent, and he found his own personal ways to express pain, joy, sadness, etc. even without speaking.
It is realistic, for nonspeaking people to be babied because they can’t say anything against it, but the reason I didn’t like it in this context is because the family are all quite educated. Hannah is a linguist, John is an intern at Eugene’s therapy centre and is very interested in special education, Mia is smart too and very into science and language, and Adam was mainly involved in Eugene’s care. And yet it took them only until he began speaking to realize that a fourteen year old didn’t like being babied by his family and everyone around him? After this, the narrative shifts into what I would call a PSA about how we shouldn’t treat disabled people differently because they’re nonspeaking, and this point is constantly repeated, as if that wasn’t obvious? I do think this theme could have been better if it was toned down a little, if the family tried their best to treat Eugene the same as any other teenager, but they did have moments where they couldn’t help following the intolerance ingrained into them. The problem is that it went from basically zero to a hundred, which made the family seem uncaring and uneducated even though they were supposed to be the exact opposite.
Mia is the main character and yet I found her very insufferable. She talks down on her family constantly. Even in the first few pages my brain couldn’t help but fit her into the stereotype of a mean teenage girl, even though she was twenty years old. She admits she was mean to her father and family in the past, and yet she isn’t any different in the present. She and her brother are also quite childish with their constant arguing and giving every event a name like That Summer or The Ultimatum even when they aren’t major events at all.
The parents are also quite flat, they both have a main characteristic that defines them and they never really break away from that.
The writing style is the last thing I want to talk about. It’s a quick read, and there are a few nice moments of emotion and tension. But overall it was very bareboned and padded up with scientific rants. Even basic concepts are explained endlessly, as if Angie Kim doesn’t trust that the reader can understand them. Kim seems to be the kind of author that believes that writing a smart character is the same as writing a character that just constantly repeats facts and rants, and she neglects other aspects of intelligence: emotional maturity, understanding others, solving problems. Even though she is clearly against the idea of there being one way to determine intelligence.