I am a product of the American South myself, so I was intrigued by the premise of this book. Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark is a memoir that uses the centering agent of fairy tales to convey meditations on life.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

Astonishing and brilliant. I wrote any dissertation on fairy tale adaptations of case records I've been working with and I'm moved and influenced by Sabrina Orah Mark's stunning writing. "Maybe because Gepetto understands that sometimes the things we create to protect us, to give us good fortune, need first to thin us into a vulnerability where the only thing that can save us are those things that almost erased us. "

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

this was a beautiful memoir told through the lens of fairy tales and i really enjoyed it. i would have liked it if it was more interwoven vs. standalone essays, but that's the nature of this specific book so i can't complain too much. i love sabrina's writing style though.

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. The author notes on the cover that this is a personal history; I call it a sort of memoir discussing her life with "fairy tales" cleverly and insightfully woven with her everyday life. At times it lagged but overall I enjoyed this unique perspective. 3.5 stars.

I’m no great fan of memoirs, but I was intrigued by the fairy tale parallels Sabrina Orah Mark offered here.

Unfortunately. this is far more memoir than fairy tale study, and carries all the tropey and angsty narcissism common to this particular breed of memoir.

The author makes some interesting observations about fairy tales, but her attempts to weave them into her own biography are a miss, and in the end the book is just way too much time inside the head of someone I can’t imagine wanting to spend time with.

The concept certainly had potential, but needed an author who was both more appealing as a character in her own story.

This is an interestingly styled memoir. It's written as essays (loosely chronological) about significant events in the author's life, and each essay is connected back to a fairy tale.

This is definitely a very personal memoir for the author, touching on some emotional topics ranging from loss to fear and insecurity.

The essays were written in a bit of a literary way, so while this book may not be for everyone, I found it interesting how the author made those every day connections to fairy tales in her life.

This is a quite clever memoir that uses the examination of fairy tales to comment on the author's life raising two Black Jewish children in the South. It's not a book to pick up and read through in one shot. It's a book to savor, discuss, consult, re-visit, consider and enjoy. In other words, it is a lot!

One would not read one fairy tale after another. It's too much, right? I suggest that readers take this one slow. The writing is both clever and exquisite. As a librarian, I'd almost want to put it in the reference section!

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's different... and different is good.

This is a really interesting collection of what I assume are autobiographical shorts. The author wrote the series for publication in the Paris Review, from Athens, GA where she lives with her husband and 2 little boys. Wildly imaginative, and equally open with readers about her personal life and private thoughts, each story really was a mystery in that you never knew where it would end up. Although each story is based on elements of fairy tales, they incorporate also race and religion, her parents' divorce, her husband's earlier marriages, her point of view as step-daughter as well as step-mother, her sister's health, and the contents of her sons' pockets.

I loved her reference to the über-thorough Bavarian survey of everybody everywhere to gather fairy tales, which I first learned about in Kessel, Germany at Grimmwelt, an amazing museum dedicated to the Brothers Grimm. I come away from Happily with a reinforced fascination with fairytales (not our American happily-ever-after versions, but the others that are more brutally realistic), and also with this list of related reads:

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
The False Grandmother by Italo Calvo
The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone by Kellie Wells
Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault
Stepmother by Robert Coover

A very different sort of memoir. Mark has framed her essays by fairy tales, drawing comparisons between life and the stories. This works better in some than others. If you, like me, aren't a fan of fairy tales (or remember them only in outline), this is still a well written and thoughtful look at life. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

I was introduced to Sabrina Orah Mark’s writing in a generative prose poetry class in fall of 2021. I was fascinated with how Mark was able to capture surrealism and use it to write relatable stories and poems. When I heard about her new book coming out, I was ecstatic and I still feel that way after reading the book. This memoir-in-essays of Mark’s life, specifically discussing relationships, motherhood, and family, is stunning and heartbreaking. The weaving of fairy tales and memoir is fascinating and gorgeous. I enjoyed the little deep dives into the various fairy tales that were discussed in each chapter and how they connected to certain life events and people in Mark’s life. I can’t wait to buy a physical copy of this. This is definitely going on the bookshelf.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

📚 Book Review 📚
A huge thank you to @netgalley and Random House Publishing group for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Happily
Author: Sabrina Orah Mark
Genre: Memoir
Date published: 2023
Primary Setting: USA 🇺🇸

📚Synopsis:
Through a collection of short essays, the author connects elements of traditional fairy tales to reflect on her life experiences as a Jewish woman raising Black children in America.

✍️ My review:
First of all, this book did not leave me feeling happy and uplifted as I thought it might from the title … I guess I should have looked closer at the image 🙄 (a better title might have been “a long way from happily ever after”). The book is well written and does an interesting job of reflecting on how traditional fairy tales can still find relevance in todays climate and culture… just don’t expect any of the fairy tales to be sugar-coated or Disney-fied.

💕You might like this book if:
🔹you have an interest in the dark side of fairy tales
🔹 you are looking for a point-of-view that explores the struggles of surviving modern life

I initially requested this book based on the premise of interspersing fairy tales with a memoir and I was not disappointed in the least. Sabrina Orah Mark's voice is creative and smart, with the perfect amounts of quirky and humorous mixed in amongst the author tackling some truly difficult things. What a winsome, wise, and well-done book. I adored it.

I really enjoyed the essays in Happily. I liked the fresh concept of looking at one's life through the lens of fairy tales. The essays were a little wacky at times, but overall the writing was a good look at family, race, faith, and all of life's worries.

I need to preface by saying that Sabrina Orah Mark is one of my favourite writers. I discovered and fell in love with her distinctive style through her short story, “The Professor” published in Bennington Review, and her 2018 collection, Wild Milk only solidified that love. One time I even crashed her virtual reading and Q&A session hosted by some college in California (I live in Montreal, Canada). Needless to say, I was thrilled to see that her Paris Review column, “Happily” would be published by Random House in 2023. This essay collection includes favourites from that column (“Sorry Peter Pan, We’re Over You,” “Fuck the Bread, the Bread is Over,” “Time to Pay the Piper,” “We didn’t Have a Chance to Say Goodbye”) and a bunch of new ones, sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue in true fairy tale fashion. As expected, I loved it. I am in awe of the way Mark sees the world; how she employs whimsicality and childlike curiosity to disentangle complex, adult feelings. She strings together words into magical sentences, into magical paragraphs. Unsurprising, due to her background in poetry, but stunning nonetheless. She is a true spellworker. Real life, for SOM (i.e. motherhood, marriage, family, Judaism, career frustration, sensitive societal issues, and more) is addressed in each essay as if through the prism of a fairy tale—imbued with caution and lessons and symbols and beauty. This quality allows her to write candidly about her life while fixing the reader at a slight distance from its gravity, as though we are watching the action from behind a pane of frosted glass—or a scrim of swan feathers.

This is one of the essay collections you're probably going to be hearing a lot about this year. This originally started as an essay series about motherhood and raising Black and Jewish children in today's nightmare hellscape over at the Paris Review, and expanded further to this framing method of fairy tales. There are quite a few gut punches in this collection, and it's definitely one I'm going to be recommending to a bunch of friends who are parents. Pick this up when it comes in July!

I don't think I realized quite how dark some of this book would be. The magical realism was interesting but the book just really weighed me down. I think a better description would be better because if I went in expecting more what it actually was like, I would have been in a better headspace for it.

That said, I really liked the weaving in of the fairytale and memoir elements.

Wild Milk by this author is one of my all time favorite books, so I was really excited to get this ARC. It had a lot of what I love about the author's other works, the essays are surreal and strange while also being relatable and sometimes so starkly honest as to be a gut punch. Things aren't what they seem, but they're also somehow piercingly exactly as they are. The fairy tale motif that threads the essays together fits perfectly with the tone of the book. I found it totally engaging and full of surprises and gorgeously, ruthlessly written. Some of the essays hit more than others for me, I'd say this one felt a little less tightly woven than Wild Milk. But I very much enjoyed reading it. Reading this author is always such a strange and engaging experience. I'd definitely recommend it for readers looking for something odd in the best way.

A singular and strange memoir-in-essays using fairytales as the lens through which Sabrina Orah Mark views her life. The prose is gorgeous and the imagery is whimsical, and inside of the scaffolding of fairytales, Mark considers religion, family, race, and the many types of grief. It’s a beautiful, slender collection with the whole world inside it.

This was not at all what I expected. It was much heavier and darker than the blurb seemed to suggest it would be. I didn't mind that, I just didn't expect it.

Mark has captured a lot of the tension and stress of being a parent and step-parent in these uncertain and oh-so-strange times and presented it in a way that is stark and dramatic. The writing is not going to be for everyone. This is not a linear or straightforward memoir so much as a series of trips into one woman's life experience, which she is trying to make sense of via the framework of fairy tales.

It is not always an easy read, but it certainly was a moving one.