Tour: Secrets to Happiness

Secrets to Happiness
by Sarah Dunn

Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While Holly's wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman asks Holly for advice about her love life - with one of Holly's exes!

Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. Any self-respecting thirtyish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog and a good-natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana.

From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a bighearted, knife-sharp, hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal - and a thoroughly modern take on our perpetual struggle to be happy.

First Sentence:
"Do you want to know the secret to a happy marriage?"

When I first started the book I didn't think that I was going to enjoy it because there are so many different characters that you have to follow, but I am glad that I stuck it through because I grew to love most of them and hate a couple of the others. However it was still a little hard to remember some of them, it would mention someone and it took a while to figure out who they were referring to.

I do love Sarah's writing style. It was very easy to relate to all of the characters, mostly because between all of them there was every type of relationship and the problems that come along with them represented. I also liked the fact that even though the relationships were kind of generic, Sarah was still able to through a lot of twists into the story that I wasn't expecting.

My absolute favorite thing about Secrets to Happiness is the fact that the main character, Holly Frick, is a novelist. This allows for many book related thoughts which leads to amazing quotes like the ones below. :)

Favorite Quotes:

"I can't help it if I find money interesting. That's why I like Victorian novels. Trollope always tells you exactly how much money everybody has. It makes everything clear." Holly reached for her menu and then said quietly, almost to herself, "In real life, I never have any idea what the hells going on."

The nice thing about dating a novelist is, they come with a manual.

Title: Secrets to Happiness

Author: Sarah Dunn

Hardcover: 400 pages

ISBN 10: 0743298926

ISBN 13: 978-0743298926
Buy It: Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble
Review Number: 15

About the author:

Sarah Dunn was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She went to the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English and graduated magna cum laude. After college, she wrote a humor column for the Philadelphia City Paper while waiting tables (poorly) at TGI Fridays.

When she was 24, she published The Official Slacker Handbook, and was subsequenty lured out to Hollywood to write for Murphy Brown, Spin City and Veronica's Closet. She left TV to work on her first novel, The Big Love, which came out in 2004 and has been translated into 23 languages. She is currently writting a television pilot for NBC called George & Hilly, and her log-awaited second novel, Secrets to Happiness, comes out this spring.

She is married to Peter Stevenson, the executive editor of The New York Observer, and they have a chunky delicious new baby boy named Harry.

Thanks to Miriam of Early Bird Blog Tours at Hachette Book Group , I have received a second copy to giveaway. Unfortunately, according to Hachette rules the winner must have a valid U.S. or Canadian mailing address (no PO boxes). The contest will run from June 12th to June 19th, 2009. The winner will be chosen by random.org and will be notified by email.

To be entered you MUST leave a comment here answering the question "If you were friends with a married couple and one of them was having an affair, would you be compelled to tell?" You MUST also leave a valid email address. If the directions above are not followed you will not be entered.

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