So Happy for You: A Novel

by Celia Laskey

Overview

*A PureWow Best Beach Read of Summer 2022*
*A Washington Post Best Book of June*
*An Entertainment Weekly Best Book for Summer*
*A Glamour Best New Book to Get Your Summer Started*
*A Vogue Queer Book to Read This Summer*

A wedding weekend spirals out of control in this bold, electrifying, hilarious novel about the complexities of female friendship

Robin and Ellie have been best friends since childhood. When Robin came out, Ellie was there for her. When Ellie's father died, Robin had her back. But when Ellie asks Robin to be her maid of honor, she is reluctant. A queer academic, Robin is dubious of the elaborate wedding rituals now sweeping the nation, which go far beyond champagne toasts and a bouquet toss. But loyalty wins out, and Robin accepts.

Yet, as the wedding weekend approaches, a series of ominous occurrences lead Robin to second-guess her decision. It seems that everyone in the bridal party is out to get her. Perhaps even Ellie herself.

Manically entertaining, viciously funny and eerily campy, So Happy for You is the ultimate send-up to our collective obsession with the wedding industrial complex and a riveting, unexpectedly poignant depiction of friendship in all its messy glory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335426901
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	795,090
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Celia Laskey is the author of Under the Rainbow, a finalist for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Guernica, the Minnesota Review and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She lives with her wife in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Laskey (Under the Rainbow) sends up the wedding industrial complex in this enjoyable and darkly comic outing. Robin Hawkins, a lesbian and self-described “rabid feminist,” loathes weddings, pumpkin spice lattes, and everything suburban and heteronormative. She is comfortably ensconced in her “liberal-queer bubble” when her estranged high school best friend Ellie announces her engagement and asks Robin to be her maid of honor. The novel is set in a slightly different version of reality in which the American government aggressively incentivizes young people to wed, and where single women are labeled “leftovers” at 27 and “rotten” at 35 on social media. Also, the high divorce rate has created a cottage industry of “wedding charm” rituals meant to ensure the success rate of each union; some are as benign as carrying bouquets of garlic and sage to “ward off evil marriage-ruining spirits,” while others, like at Ellie’s wedding, involve blood sacrifice. Robin continues to ignore her better judgment as ominous events befall the bridal party, among them a near drowning, and Ellie’s behavior grows increasingly unhinged. Though a few outlandish events stretch the bounds of believability, the story has plenty of verve, and the social satire is accurate if not especially profound. There’s nothing exceptional about this, but it nails what it sets out to do. Agent: Alexa Stark, Trident Media Group. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Hilarious and wise, So Happy for You reveals the deeper and more sinister truths behind one of society’s most commonplace institutions—marriage, and does so with a pitch-perfect, relentlessly inquisitive narrator at the helm. At its core, this is an investigation of friendship and just how much we will sacrifice of our true selves in the name of tradition. This novel made me laugh, made me think, and spun its way to a wholly surprising and thrilling conclusion, where ‘together forever’ takes on a much more terrifying connotation than most of us can imagine. Laskey is a magician, combining the important social commentary this genre needs with a knock-out page-turning narrative that will leave you guessing to the last page."—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

"So Happy for You is the sort of devilishly clever summer read I crave. Like the worst wedding in history, I watched it unfold with my hands over my eyes and a laugh in my throat, eager to see it fly off the rails."—John Fram, author of The Bright Lands

"Celia Laskey's sly thriller completely transfixed me from beginning to end. Tart and playful, this tale of a wedding weekend gone fatally wrong is part psychological game, part societal inquest, and part best friend break-up from hell. I loved this trim and thrashing read."—Amy Jo Burns, author of Shiner

“Magnificent. In So Happy for You, Celia Laskey has masterfully crafted the tense, messy, big-hearted, and deeply original queer love story we didn’t know we’ve been waiting for, as much full of human characters as incisive social commentary. I can’t wait to see what Laskey gives us next.”—Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am

“So Happy for You skewers the wedding-industrial complex with uproarious bitterness and gleeful fury, and a spiraling absurdism that will leave you wondering whether it's all that absurd after all. If you've ever gritted your teeth through a nightmare wedding, this one's for you. A firecracker of a book.”—Micah Nemerever, author of These Violent Delights


"The sweet spot of dystopia...grounded in sufficient reality for the reader to pose the question, could this really happen?"—Kirkus Reviews

"Enjoyable and darkly comic."—Publishers Weekly

"A force of dark humor, captivating in its boldness and its portrayal of a friendship torn apart by tradition. For readers of satire and thrillers with an added dose of dystopia."—Booklist

"[A] campy, captivating and slightly creepy exploration of the complexities of female friendships and the wedding industrial complex."—E! News


“[A] compelling exploration of the world of weddings and a complex dive into female friendship.”—Honey Pop

“Manically entertaining, viciously funny and eerily campy, So Happy for You is the ultimate send-up to our collective obsession with the wedding industrial complex and a riveting, unexpectedly poignant depiction of friendship in all its messy glory.”—Lesbrary

“The novel unravels at full force to become a psychological game of chess with ‘Handmaid's Tale’ references and just enough sinister plot twists to keep the tension taut.”—Edge Media Network

"At once hilarious and insightful... a great beach read."—Shondaland

"Funny, dark, [and] slightly crazed.. So Happy for You is part romp, part social commentary on being a queer woman in a culture dead set on literally zipping women into tight dresses and marching us down the aisle."—Glamour

"Laskey excels at writing queer fiction that dazzles... So Happy for You is the kind of book best enjoyed with no distractions, beside a beautiful body of water."—Vogue


"Campy, eerie, and unexpectedly very funny."—Cosmopolitan

"[A] deliciously twisted story about the highs and lows of friendship and female expectation."—PureWow

"If you’re going to multiple weddings this year, So Happy For You might speak to you in a visceral way. A fast-paced satirical thriller"—Today.com

From the Publisher

01/01/2022

International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Misérables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek—close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature—is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story—and the story of Cameroon's independence—on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.

Library Journal

2022-03-30
Society’s obsession with unwed women leads to destruction.

From the first line of Laskey’s novel, readers may wonder if they’re dealing with hyperbole or horror: “If you want to know the story of how my best friend and I ended up trying to kill each other, I should probably start with the night she asked me to be her maid of honor.” Robin Hawkins, a queer Brooklyn woman in her early 30s, is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on society’s pervasive focus on marriage. It's a time when only 21% of people get married and 76% of marriages end in divorce, meaning “fewer people were buying houses and having kids, which meant suburbs became ghost towns and cities became wildly over-crowded...even though Americans were happier than ever….Happiness was not good for capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy.” Urged by her adviser to make her dissertation sexier by adding real-life case studies, Robin hesitantly agrees to be the maid of honor at her best friend Ellie’s wedding. From there, a series of increasingly sinister events unfolds, spurred on by Ellie’s desperation to bring good luck to her wedding and Robin’s growing unrest. The bridezilla trope is pretty well played out by now, and Laskey winks a little too much at The Handmaid’s Tale. Nevertheless, Laskey successfully creates an eerie tone for the novel and a discomforting closeness between Ellie and Robin, two women who share a deep bond forged in adolescence. Ultimately, the novel settles into the sweet spot of dystopia: just unrealistic enough to feel fantastical but grounded in sufficient reality for the reader to pose the question, could this really happen?

An exploration of a friendship brought to the brink.

Kirkus Reviews