I wish authors and editors would realize that the eBook
format does not accommodate footnotes very well. They all appear at the end of the chapter, so
that all context is forgotten. Also, a
chart with highlighting showed no highlighting whatsoever on my kindle. All that aside, this book is a missing-person
mystery with a bunch of other unnecessary asides, and because of these
diversions, I did not like it as well as
Miracle
Creek. Adam, a
stay-at-home dad, disappears after an outing with his son Eugene, who is
autistic and, due to other complications, unable to speak. Eugene returns alone, visibly agitated. The family, especially Mia, Adam’s
twenty-something daughter and first-person narrator, entertain various theories
about what happened to Adam: he ran off
with a mistress, or he committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis, or
worst of all, Eugene pushed him into a raging river. No one can quite fathom any of these
scenarios, and it becomes increasingly likely that Adam is dead. This novel is very suspenseful, but it has
too many distractions, the primary one being Adam’s research into the
quantification of happiness.
Really? The book’s early examples
of how unpredictable happiness is and how it is relative to a baseline, such as
winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing injury, are intriguing. However, this “happiness quotient” is a topic
that the author overemphasizes throughout the book, and I don’t really
understand why. It seems to be a theory
that she wanted to convey somewhere, and this novel was as good a vehicle as
any.
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