Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel

By Sherrie Flick

Book Overview

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other's lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803225210
• ISBN13: 9780803225213
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Reconsidering Happiness

This book is a beautiful reflection on how we come to terms with our lives, our loves, and most importantly our relationship to the self. Filled with lush and thoughtful descriptions, Sherrie Flick's writing appeals to all the senses and fully recreates the worlds that her characters inhabit. This novel is a delicate balance of past and present, of hunger and of satiation, of accident and of action. While this novel may not be a perfect match for readers who prefer strong and linear plot lines, Flick demonstrates her mastery of using the physical landscape to mirror the psychological state of her characters. Reconsidering Happiness speaks loudest in its moments of quiet reflection.

It takes time to find happiness

Don't look for a fast-paced story here because you won't find it. And that seems at least partly the point. These people--Vivette and Margaret, mostly, but also the men in their lives--are searching and constantly refining what it means to be happy. That's something that develops over time, and through scenes in a fractured timeline the reader gets the sense of that evolution. I love that these are not perfect people with great lives. They're pretty ordinary, and they're flawed, and that's what makes this book a really fascinating read. That and the beautiful language.

Reading Happiness

RECONSIDERING HAPPINESS is a lovely, smart, patient book. It starts out with Vivette's breathless, solo sprint away from a confusing life in the East, settles down into a comfortable pattern of modern-day pioneering that takes us across the Plains out West to meet Margaret, and finally ends with a gentle ellipsis in Des Moines. True to her name, Vivette is alive, vivacious, electric, and someone I'd like to take a long roadtrip with for sure, because you know she's going to stop at every diner that serves homemade pie and every bar with a pool table. If you're looking for a lovely reading experience about a young woman who considers (and reconsiders) the nature of joy and contentment as she boldly explores worlds of possibilities, this is your book. The constant presence of food and the making of food also helps make it a sensuous book of lust, longing, and the undying American spirit, where the desire to head into the sunset leaving the past in the dust is alive and well.