This was a very good follow-up recommendation for fans of Crying in HMart, very successful amongst burnt out millennials and their parents who are trying to understand them better.

Happy for You by Claire Stanford is the story of Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto who has been working on her still-unfinished philosophy dissertation for four years, she also seems unready to accept a marriage proposal from her long-term boyfriend. But, all around her, everyone else seems to be getting on with their lives: her optimistic boyfriend, Jamie, has no hesitation about committing to future together, and even her reserved Japanese father is energized by a new relationship--his first since her mother's passing when Evelyn was just fourteen.

Evelyn accepts a job at a major internet company where she is responsible for aiding in the development of an app that will help users quantify--and augment--their happiness. It is at this company that Evelyn begins to think of her own happiness and the steps she must take to be genuinely happy.

Will Evelyn ever be happy in her life? Will she be able to creative an app that helps people with their happiness when she seems unhappy with her life?

For a book with this title, there was not much happiness happening. I’m fact, some parts are quite sad. Nevertheless, I am sure that many will enjoy this novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Viking for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

HAPPY FOR YOU by Claire Stanford is a novel that made me smile (I loved the repeated references to the third-most-popular-internet company), but also this debut text made me sigh as the pace was rather slow. True to form, the main character, a young woman named Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto, is very introspective; even noting at one point: "How was it possible that I knew so much about how to think, but so little about what to do?" She struggles to understand and cope with Silicon Valley norms while working with colleagues on a research project to define and promote happiness. Stanford deftly captures Evelyn's inability to commit: Evelyn grapples with unclear feelings in her personal life with boyfriend Jamie and with her widowed father who has found a new companion after almost twenty years. The many incidents where Evelyn reflects on what it means to be bi-racial were often more perceptive than her comments on happiness. HAPPY FOR YOU may be worth a look, particularly if you enjoyed recommended titles like Joan is Okay by Weike Wang, Sourdough by Robin Sloan, or Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong.

I find myself having a hard time writing this review. I read this book in one sitting - the premise captivated me and I had to know how it ended. However the ending left me feeling unsatisfied - maybe because it felt too real / too close to home? Evelyn leaves her PHD program to work at the 3rd most popular internet company where her team is researching their new app that is meant to define each user's happiness. As part of the research, they are beta users of the app, and let's just say learning about your happiness score relative to others isn't the most satisfying. The more I read the more it made me want to get off my phone and limit big tech company's ability to use my data. In full transparency, I am a performance marketer and we use a ton of data to serve relevant ads to customers interested in our product, but this felt different since it was judging a consumers happiness/well-being versus just serving relevant content. I'm conflicted with my rating - I'd give the premise 4 stars, but how it made me feel was a solid 3 stars. This book reminded be a lot of The Circle - if you enjoyed that one, you'll like this! If you've read I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thank you NetGalley and Viking Publishing for the ARC of this book!

Happy for You is a quiet, thought-provoking novel about the age old question of how to define happiness. Evelyn quits writing her dissertation on philosophy to join a tech company that is developing an app to gauge happiness. Evelyn is skeptical about the project, but throughout the story we see her tackling and questioning her relationships, losses, and her identity as an Asian-American.while nor quite a misfit, Evelyn seeks to justify who she is and what she wants out of life. I thought this debut novel was heartfelt, introspective and so relatable to the current world we live in that is obsessed with social media and “likes.”

Thank you to Penguin Group Viking and NetGalley for this ARC.

This book was not what I expected based on the blurb. It felt like less of a cheeky indictment of our current tech-obsessed society, and more of a meditation on one woman's personal journey in which she questions her own happiness, and what that might look like for her. I enjoyed the book, but it didn't stick with me long after reading.

What is happiness? This book deals with a young woman working for a tech company and engaged to learn the answers to this eternal question. I didn’t relate to her, and I found the book veered off into a different direction from the one I expected. The author manages to pull it all together and give closure to readers. There is much for reading groups to discuss.

This was not what I expected when I began the book.