Review: The Forgotten Guide to Happiness

Title: The Forgotten Guide to Happiness

Author: Sophie Jenkins

Publisher: 26 July 2018 by Avon Books

Pages: 320 pages

How I Read It: ARC book

Genre: women's fiction, romance, contemporary

My Rating: 3 cups

Synopsis:

Sometimes, happiness can be found where you least expect it…

Twenty-eight-year-old Lana Green has never been good at making friends. She’s perfectly happy to be left alone with her books. Or at least, that’s what she tells herself.

Nancy Ellis Hall was once a celebrated writer. Now eighty, she lives alone in her North London house, and thinks she’s doing just fine. But dementia is loosening Nancy’s grip on the world.

When Lana and Nancy become unconventional house mates, their lives will change in ways they never expected. But can an unusual friendship rescue two women who don’t realise they need to be saved?

An irresistible story of love, memory and the power of friendship that readers of The Keeper of Lost Things and The Lidowill adore.

My Thoughts

‘... It’s not what you’ll do for love, but what you’ll give up. This was my test and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake this time.’

The Forgotten Guide to Happiness is enjoyable and heartwarming with its touching storyline, solid characters and an easy to read writing style. It is most definitely not the typical formula for a romance book, which was good. There are a range of tales to be told here, that will undoubtedly engage you on more than one level.

‘Love. What was it all about? I thought about my dad and Jo-Ann’s unlikely alliance and whether love amounted to nothing more than finding someone you could watch Netflix with.’

The main character Lana is ‘challenging’, but her flaws are what make her more real. She is a writer searching for a subject for her next book, after her initial book about her whirlwind romance with a travel photographer was a hit. In her search for a story/hero (plus a search for a place to stay and money to pay for things) she befriends a famous feminist novelist from years gone by, who is suffering with dementia and the stepson that cares for her. So you see, apart from Lana’s journey, there is the journey of Nancy and her battle with dementia, plus Jack and his saddened view of love. More than the one proverbial string to this bow as I stated.

‘It’s not right, is it? What are we saving her from, Lana? What are we saving her for? So that she can live a long old age locked up in a place that’s not her own?’

The story was travelling along pleasantly enough until just over the halfway mark when, in my view, Lana completely lost the plot. I know .... I  know ... it was her journey, her lessons to be learnt - but seriously! For all her complaining, this particular event was a little hard to swallow. This twist in the tale did not make sense to me at all.  It was like Lana became a completely different person. This is where the story lost its way a bit for me.

‘We both had our baggage, and even though it wasn’t actually matching, it was definitely the same brand.’

The characters that kept me engaged to the end were Nancy and Jack. He is a good soul with so much heart. Nancy added the flamboyance to the tale  and more of her story would have been beneficial to the overall storyline. Not only her history, but her battle with dementia and its impact on those around her. Overall a good tale about love and the power of friendships.

‘These are the reasons that I like to write: it’s safe. It’s so much easier to make sense of the world in fiction, where there are rules and regulations and the writer has total control over people’s actions. The problem I’ve always had with real life is, you never know what’s going to happen.’

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.