BookLife Review: Happiness Falls, A Novel, by Angie Kim
mystery, missing person, Angelman syndrome, Korean-American family, family secrets, non-verbal communication, twins
Happiness Falls is a compelling mystery in which the married father of three teens has gone missing. Author Angie Kim’s protagonist, Mia, is extremely well-developed and realized and from the start the reader empathizes with her self-acknowledged missteps. When the story opens, Mia’s father is already missing, and the only possible witness to his disappearance is her brother Eugene. However, Eugene suffers from Angelman’s syndrome and is unable to speak or communicate the details of his outing with his father. The family is atypical, with a working mom, twin teens, a special needs child and an at-home dad as the primary caretaker. Kim skillfully draws even the secondary characters here—the mom, the lead police officer, and the attorney who specializes in representing children with special needs like Eugene.
The local police consider Eugene a suspect in his father’s disappearance, which infuriates the family, given their father’s devotion to the care and education of Eugene. Over the course of the investigation and search, family secrets are revealed, including the dad’s cancer diagnosis, his long (and secret) ongoing efforts to teach Eugene alternate methods of communicating, and a curious experiment their father was conducting on happiness. The family’s assumptions around the limitations around Eugene’s ability to comprehend, learn and communicate crumble around them. Yet, they face a conundrum. If they unlock Eugene’s ability to communicate what he knows about their father’s disappearance, what will they discover? Was Eugene implicated in his father’s disappearance? Was their father involved with another woman? Did their father commit suicide?
The inability of the key witness to speak or communicate may be a literary device used to sustain and unfold this mystery, but it is a clever one. It is a problem with a solution that requires the length of a novel, an extensive police investigation and a parallel family investigation, to solve. A worthwhile mystery for fans of the genre, and one with a couple of good twists at the end, the kind that leave some open questions to haunt the reader, in the best way.