Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center

  

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Women's Fiction, Romance, Clean Romance, Contemporary Fiction
Content: Maybe some mild language, but I can't remember anything

 

A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying, ten years younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. It's supposed to be a chance for her to pull herself together again, but when she discovers that her brother's even-more-annoying best friend is also coming on the trip, she can't imagine how it will be anything other than a disaster. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, and a group of sorority girls.

Yet, despite everything, the vast wilderness has a way of making Helen's own little life seem bigger, too. And, somehow the people who annoy her the most start teaching her the very things she needs to learn. Like how to stand up for herself. And how being scared can make you brave. And how sometimes you just have to get really, really lost before you can even have a hope of being found. 

I watched the movie adaptation of this on Netflix not knowing it was based on a book until after I had seen it. I enjoyed the movie so that led me to want to read the book. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed the book more, but I do have to say that as movie adaptations go, I thought this one was pretty good, even if it left out some parts in the book that I thought were good, like the road trip at the beginning and the bar mitzvah at the end. The characters in the book were younger than the characters in the movie and had a larger age difference. I really liked the chemistry between the characters both in the book and in the movie. Overall, this book and movie left we with good, positive feelings. I liked how it exuded hope and the characters were easy to love. This is the first book I've tried by this author and I'm looking forward to reading another one of her books, The Lost Husband, which was also made into a movie that I've seen.

“Getting what you want doesn't make you happy... Having doesn't make you happy: appreciating does; Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”