Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Happiness for Beginners: A Novel

Top positive review

A different twist to a romanic outdoor tale!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 8, 2022

I liked the plot it wasn’t a regular romantic story it had some twists in it to make it more interesting. Her characters were well done. However, the writing could have been more developed, found some places a little thin. On the whole I liked the book.

Top critical review

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MizRen.

Well written novel

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 27, 2023

Good book, I liked all the characters, just the story didn't go deep enough for me. Wilderness trip seemed to short.

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From Canada

Kt2

So fun!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great adventure story in life and love! Take risks, remember the good, and find happiness! And always listen to Grandma!

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the chef's wife

Loved it

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

Humorous quick read - light but entertaining.

One person found this helpful

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Ffiona and Stella

A total joy

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 6, 2023

A total joy, with a fantastic setting, a delightful cast of characters, a hot, pining-for-you-forever love interest, and a thoughtful look at the complexities of happiness. I think one of the things I enjoy so much about Katherine Center's books is that I find the central questions the heroines struggle with so relatable, yet those struggles are balanced with humour and fantastic friendships and swoony love stories, so the struggles never feel as bogged down in negative feelings as they do in real life. In this one, the heroine is desperate for an epiphany that will change her life. Naturally, she's the one who needs to change, and the changes she needs to make are so small, and yet so difficult after years of learned behaviours. Boy, do I get it. I also enjoy the way Center makes me care so much about the side characters, whether it's a group of sexist firemen that gradually learn to become at least somewhat less sexist, or a group of naive hikers we know from first introduction are going to grow on the us the same way they'll grow on the unimpressed heroine. Also: a quirky dog, scrabble jokes, a thematic and also funny thread about nicknames, and plenty of Big Feels, from first chapter to final page.

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Jenelle Johnstone

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 30, 2016

Verified Purchase

A great summer book. I loved the characters. Read it in a day. Couldn't put it down.

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DG Buyer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 7, 2018

Great Book!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 1, 2016

Verified Purchase

Great easy read!

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Susan's Reviews

Hilarious, Adventurous, and Sizzling Hot! What more could you want in a book?!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 6, 2019

I laughed uproariously so many times while reading this book! The slow burn attraction between Helen and Jake had me holding my breath whenever they were in a scene together. Center's vivid characters became so real to me, and the plot was riveting: I love strong female characters who have to face adversity and who triumph, in their own way - even if they don't achieve exactly what they originally set out to do. Helen's emotional evolution as she struggled, totally out of her depth, to keep up with a younger, healthier crowd of survivalists out in the wilderness was downright captivating: her often defensive, prickly personality, tempered by her original way of expressing her wicked sense of humour kept me glued to the story well into the early hours of the morning. Highly recommended!!!

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Sabine Foster

5 glowing, laughing,crying, wonderful, all-time-favourite stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 17, 2018

5 glowing, laughing,crying, wonderful, all-time-favourite stars
I loved, LOVED, loved this book so much! I had to create a new Goodreads shelf for it: all-time-favourite!

I laughed A LOT...then I cryed a bit and then I laughed while I was crying. I learned to look at things a different, better way. And while I did I had the greatest time ever.

In the beginning I thought, this book is kinda funny, then I thought it is really good, then I thought it is amazing and when I thought it can't get any better it did.

Did I mention that I don't like books that make me cry because I want books to make me happy and not sad. This was different. I enjoyed every minute of it and I know I will come back at some point and read it again (which I normally don't do).

I don't know why there is not much talk about this book - it so deserves it. Please, go get yourself a copy and read it!

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From other countries

Weronika

Inspiring and lighthearted page turner!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 25, 2023

Verified Purchase

I had no expectations going into this book and it was everything 💚 Lovely characters and inspiring story of one woman’s journey to become her best self after divorce.

Helen is a schoolteacher about to embark on a three week survival course in Wyoming, while hiking and camping in the wilderness, she hopes to become braver and stronger personally. Dropping off her rescue dog with her brother Duncan, she finds out his goofy best friend, Jake, is also joining the course and needs to catch a ride with her.

I couldn’t put this book down, hands down my favorite from Katherine I have read so far! I loved Helen’s internal monologues and how brave she was to do this hike in the first place, it sounds very intimidating! Her quickly developing relationship with Jake was so sweet, I loved the easygoing banter immediately. Jake is, what the kids call, a cinnamon roll 100%. His story is also heartbreaking and heartwarming, he’s just a great guy. ❤️❤️❤️

This novel was surprisingly deep and I kept being pulled into it more and more. A fantastic unlikely group of characters, great bonding and funny, I loved all the silly jokes and nicknames 🤣 - and finger guns! It was giving me all the good feels and I kinda need to take a hike now 😆

Fittingly, I started reading this on Earth Day and I just loved the messaging of being one with nature. At one point there’s a quote from Beckett, the hike guide:

“All-knowing Mother, […] I’m sorry human beings are such a blight. I’m sorry we litter your earth and choke the fish in your oceans with plastic grocery sacks. We have been given incomprehensible beauty on this earth, but we don’t see it. We walk around angry and blind and ungrateful. I wish we were better, our dumb human race, but I don’t have much hope that we ever will be. The best I can do today is say: Thank you for this world of miracles. We will try to be more grateful. And less ridiculous.”

5 Stars
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

2 people found this helpful

Alpha Reader

A favourite author

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on January 27, 2022

Verified Purchase

‘Happiness for Beginners’ was the 2015 women’s fiction novel by American author Katherine Center.

It has been a rocky, rocky start to 2022. Omicron got me. Australian summer has been unrelenting. Everything has been thrown off kilter and the last thing I felt like doing with a foggy head and post-Covid chest infection (oh yeah, severe asthmatic triple-boosted still felt that rona bite!) – the last thing I was even capable of doing was reading, for pleasure. It’s been an uphill battle to get back into the swing … enter; Katherine Center. A new-to-me author I discovered in 2020 and instantly appreciated that she had a backlist I could drip-feed to myself when the slumps got deep. Which I finally did this week, and with ‘Happiness for Beginners.’

Now – before I give you the lowdown, just know that yes indeed, this book is undoubtedly a by-product of the 2012 bookish fever for ‘Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail’ by Cheryl Strayed. It’s the story of Helen Carpenter who decides that a year after her divorce was finalised, she’s going to finally regain control of her life by doing a wilderness survival course that’s so far outside her comfort zone, she’s going to be in a new stratosphere of self-improvement. The only thing is; her younger brother’s annoying best friend Jake is tagging along – not only for a lift to the camp, but on the wilderness trek itself. Helen has never thought twice about Jake in all the years she’s known him; but suddenly this ten-years-younger than her upstart is clouding her head and ruining her very much solo mission of self-discovery

What follows is the 3-week long trek, its trials and tribulations (made worse by the fact that Helen is the oldest person on the hike, everyone else is a 20-something college student doing this for credit) and the fact that Jake has revealed how long he’s been in love with his best friend’s sister, but also that he can’t pursue her. Much as he’d like to, and – to Helen’s surprise – she’d like him to.

Okay. I loved this book! It is like ‘Wild’ but without the unrelenting sombreness of it all (and while – yes – Helen’s divorce is the catalyst for her adventure, she also has familial grief she’s unknowingly working through.) Something I love about Center’s books is that you know she’s put the work in; I thought it with 'Things You Save in a Fire' (unsurprised to learn that her husband is a volunteer firefighter), and it comes through here too. She does actually walk us in Helen’s heavy, blister-busting boots as she experiences a wilderness adventure and the practicalities and hurdles thereof. She doesn’t go overly mushy with the self-discovery and being one with nature stuff; instead she predicates Helen’s slow transformation on her ability to recognise her own limitations and patterns, and being willing to connect with people and trust in herself. I loved it!

But let’s not pretend I don’t drool over Katherine Center’s beautiful books for anything as much as the romances. And the one in ‘Happiness’ is a doozy! Jake is the young, fresh as a penny popular college guy - Helen is his best friend’s older sister, and she feels every one of the years she’s got on Jake. But they have such spark, and the unrequited, slow-burn of it all is intoxicating! I think I also loved this romance because it did remind me of the one in my favourite Center book thus far, 'Things You Save in a Fire' – which also had a kind of “himbo” love interest (except Center’s male characters are not unintelligent; they’re actually more emotionally intelligent and very much have Labrador-qualities of good guys loving on jaded and hurt women, giving them patience, space, and understanding that makes everything so much more delicious!)

Yes this is a head-tip to ‘Wild’ and probably capitalising on the Strayed-mania of it all (it kinda more reminds me of that ‘Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’ episode when Lorelai wants to have the book-experience… along with hundreds of other fans.) I don’t care, I think Center did a smashing job of taking a band wagon and making it her own.

5/5

P.S. - Helen's brother Duncan in 'Happiness' is the hero of 'What You Wish For' which I have also read and really liked, but didn't review because it was kinda just okay (3/3.5) but now knowing that Duncan from his book is the Duncan in that book ... and that Center's books all exist in a connected-universe? Ummm, I think I have to go back and re-read all of them and in order one day!

One person found this helpful

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