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Collection
Publication
Description
Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either.-Amazon.… (more)
User reviews
doesn't sound much like an endorsement but there you have it...
The characters are all interesting - it's hard for a book this short to explore so many people in depth and make them feel real and give them room to grow and develop. Unfortunately, all of this time exploring characters doesn't really leave much room for a plot. The book kind of feels like a collection of loosely-connected short stories. It is ostensibly exploring what "happiness" means and whether you can really achieve happiness based on the recommendations of a machine, but it never really delivers. The book seems promising, but I ultimately found it to be unsatisfying.
Sadly, very quickly, the narrative shifts from those potentialities to the much less interesting inner cogitations of not very interesting characters.
This was a quick and very unsatisfying read.