I'm so Happy for You
A Novel About Best Friends
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3.7 • 54 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
What if your best friend, whom you've always counted on to flounder in life and love (making your own modest accomplishments look not so bad), suddenly starts to surpass you in every way?
Wendy's best friend, Daphne, has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. If Daphne veers from suicidal to madly in love, Wendy offers encouragement. But when Daphne is suddenly engaged, pregnant, and decorating a fabulous town house in no time at all, Wendy is...not so happy for her. Caught between wanting to be the best friend she prides herself on being and crippling jealousy of flighty Daphne, Wendy takes things to the extreme, waging a full-scale attack on her best friend-all the while wearing her best, I'm-so-happy-for-you smile-and ends up in way over her head.
Rosenfeld has a knack for exposing the not-always-pretty side of being best friends--in writing that is glittering and diamond-sharp. I'M SO HAPPY FOR YOU is a smart, darkly humorous, and uncannily dead-on novel about female friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosenfeld (What She Saw) delves into the thornier side of female friendship in this hip take on modern womanhood. Wendy and Daphne have been best friends forever, but their relationship, sketched out in e-mails that cascade from their group of girlfriends, comes to a breaking point when Daphne suddenly pulls herself together, stops fooling around with a married man and finds a new love interest who happens to be handsome, rich and obnoxious. In quick succession, Daphne ties the knot, moves into a brownstone and gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Wendy, a low-paid editorial drone who's been trying and failing to conceive with her slacker husband, feels that her own life is thrown into miserable relief. She begins to lash out at Daphne, first passively, and then rather aggressively. In the course of a few twists, misunderstandings and revealed secrets, Wendy questions whether the source of her inferiority complex is Daphne or herself. The two friends are by turns frustrating and sympathetic, while Rosenfeld takes a dark, hilarious and painfully accurate view of the less-than-pure reasons why women stay friends.
Customer Reviews
You’ll hate the main character
The story is somewhat interesting (if you like watching a self-destructing train wreck of a person) but the main character is such a jealous, two-faced a-hole that it’s hard to read the mental gymnastics she does in order to justify being such a nasty friend. She fulfills every awful stereotype of why “women can’t be nice to each other” or be real friends. That’s obviously not true however, the main character did remind me of every terrible woman I’ve ever encountered who does contribute to this stereotype though. I realize that it’s kind of the premise of the book, but isn’t the main character supposed to be endearing or relatable in some way? She’s not. If you like a good-hate read, you’ll probably enjoy this, I’m still uncertain if I did though. I read this while traveling internationally (with layovers) and people around me kept laughing at the look of mild horror my face kept displaying while reading this.
Boring
I could not finish it and generally as a rule I always finish books. It just dragged and dragged.