The Book of Happy Endings: True Stories About Finding Love [Hardcover]

This book is difficult to read as it is a collection of short stories that one might hear over coffee. I don't recommend it.

At the offices of ForeWord Magazine, we all read ValMorbida's book and talked about it, over coffee and online. We loved it! Here are the highlights:

Loved "Happy Endings". My favorite stories were So Dear, New Light, Just Right, the story about Sam and Fergus and of course I couldn't wait for Marcus and Michele to meet again. Their letter writing skills gave me hope that it hasn't become a lost art.

We had a great discussion in the office about the 2 professors...can love really be that explosive? MAB

Those letters going back and forth from NYC to London seem like the real kind of magic glue that holds relationships together. Not just that they were writing on real paper with real ink, but that there was a chance encounter, a reticence, a compromise, the giving and taking and small steps forward and back that are invisible is the lusty clouds of movies, but are really so much of what makes a relationship breathtaking. (HLS)

These stories remind me of a woman I met recently who met her husband while she was on vacation in London. She was walking through a door, not paying attention, and they slammed into each other in the doorway! How romantic... (WH)


Love stories without the passion of cliché. I like these tales for their modesty, simplicity. At the end of "Love Libraries," for example, the Lithuanian librarian Rasa says to Irishman Declan in chipped English, "But we can just go out and not have to talk and we feel comfortable. That's love." I read the story thinking of Nabokov's Speak, Memory -- the comfortableness of no words that he and Tamara felt gazing at a painting in a remote corner of the Hermitage Museum.


Also, I liked Valmorbida's technique of contrast in the same story. Beginning with the simple description of two people who have eyes for one another and end being happy, the middle is jabbed with the punches of life. (AM)


There's another thing besides happy endings that I like about this book, and that's its design. It looks like a valentine -- not a store-bought, Hallmark, last-minute-in-the-grocery-store kind of valentine, but a real one, made by someone who loves you. Could be a girl, a boy, even a kid. It's fresh, cheerful, unsentimental. And look at the spine; wonderful. Somewhere between a doodle and an obsession.


But there's more. The book is actually illustrated on the inside too with the b/w photography of Augusto Braidotti, Rob Hann, Steve Mullins, and the author herself. I love the one at the end of "Hungarian kiss" -- a dark room and light both restricted and set free. It's too bad that publishers have let the tradition of illustrating adult books languish. Or did we adults force it over the cliff in our zeal to be serious, grow up, quit messing around. (HLS)

I admit, I bought this book for the beautifully designed jacket. I love the size of the book and the title captivated me; I love reading stories of happy endings. But, I've put the book down after only a few stories. It was not what I expected; though I may pick it up again later. Even in the Introduction, the author admits that not all the stories have a happy ending. Or an ending where people stay together. I was expecting something different and would have marketed and titled the book a bit differently.

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