Book Club Monday: Happiness for Beginners

Author: Katherine Center Title: Happiness for Beginners Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin Date Published: 03/24/2015

Read Dates: 01/18/2026- 01/22/2026
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫

This was my family book club pick for January.

Happiness for Beginners is a single POV women's fiction with a romance storyline. It centers on Helen, who is 32 years old and feeling stuck a year after her divorce, with just the ugliest and meanest dog she's ever met for company. She signs up for a wilderness course in Wyoming, hoping the three-week adventure will push her out of her comfort zone and help her change her life. She was not counting on Jake, the 22-year-old best friend of her annoying younger brother, hitching a ride and taking this trip with her, or how isolating it would feel to be joining a group of 20-year-old college kids who are excitedly starting their lives as hers is falling apart. I am a huge fan of Katherine Center and, while this one was good, it didn't land quite the same for me as others did. In some ways, I found Helen relatable, and I wanted to see her grow, change, and become more confident in herself and her life. I liked how the trip helped her change her perspective on her younger brother, and that it was healing in many ways. The romance storyline was where this one lost me, though. I liked Jake, and I liked Helen, but I did not find Jake and Helen together believable. At first, I thought it was the age gap, but it wasn't their ages so much as that they were at very different stages in life, and Jake just seemed too immature. I'm glad I read it, though. I found a lot of it really well done, and I will definitely continue reading new releases and catching up on Katherine Center's backlog!

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.