Title: This Is What Happy Looks Like Author: Jennifer E. Smith
Published: April 2, 2013
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 404
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When teenage movie star Graham Larkin accidentally sends small town girl Ellie O'Neill an email about his pet pig, the two seventeen-year-olds strike up a witty and unforgettable correspondence, discussing everything under the sun, except for their names or backgrounds.
Then Graham finds out that Ellie's Maine hometown is the perfect location for his latest film, and he decides to take their relationship from online to in-person. But can a star as famous as Graham really start a relationship with an ordinary girl like Ellie? And why does Ellie want to avoid the media's spotlight at all costs?
After being sort of bamboozled into reading Smith’s The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight against my better judgment (this was prior to my discovery of the many joys of genre romance), I decided that this author would be a good one to go for when in search of lighter reads that were cute and fluffy but not wholly vapid. And that is exactly what I found This is What Happy Looks Like to be. This modern-day teenage fairytale was charming and adorable, but had a lot of heart as well. I am, overall, extremely pleased with this book.
As one would expect, romance is the primary focus of this novel. Teen hearthrob Graham accidentally sends an email about his pet pig to Ellie, and the two strike up an anonymous correspondence. Tired of his celebrity lifestyle, Graham latches onto Ellie’s life in small-town Maine as a way to get back to his easy-going childhood, and persuades the director of his current film to go to Maine on location. The first thing he does is look up Ellie, and their connection in person is just as strong as it was over email—but Ellie’s scandal-filled childhood has her wary of the spotlight that inevitably comes with being in Graham’s life.
It sounds a little dramatic, maybe a bit over the top, and sure, it probably is. But Jennifer E. Smith’s delivery of this storyline is extremely down-to-earth, and the characters are not at all caricaturized projections of two star-crossed teens. This is What Happy Looks Like is not high on dramatics at all—even when drama does go down. I believed very much in Graham and Ellie as real people, and I believed in their relationship.
One thing that stood out to me, aside from the very cuddly romance, was the parent-child relationships in this book. I noted this element before with the author, and it was very present in This is What Happy Looks Like as well. Smith knows how to write complicated, nuanced relationships between teenagers and their parents. It’s subtle, not at all overwritten, but it’s done well and with an authenticity that is, sadly, lacking in the vast majority of YA I’ve read. Considering how important parents (or the lack of them) is on any child’s life, it’s surprising how seldom their role is explored by young adult fiction. Happily, this author does do that here, and I loved it. Graham’s newfound awkwardness with his lower middle-class parents on account of his celebrity felt very real, as did Ellie’s yearning for the father-figure she’d never known. I think this book is absolutely worth reading for all of its relationships, but I especially wanted to touch on this one aspect.
This book just made me so happy. In general, I think I tend to seek out the more darker, weighty side of fiction, but a book like this really proves that there’s worth in both sides of the coin. This is What Happy Looks Like was irresistibly darling, and it was very much the kind of book that makes you smile constantly while reading. I thought the characters, romance, and writing were all superb, and the end result was a delightful story.
