Shorewood Reads 2026: Happiness Falls Thematic Reads

Posted Mar 16, 2026

Shorewood Reads is our version of what many other communities have done: a community-wide event centered on reading one book.

SHOREWOOD READS 2026 features Happiness Falls by Angie Kim. 

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone, or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak. What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. 

Meet author Angie Kim on Thursday, April 23, 2026. 

 

Below are titles that thematically related to Angie Kim's Happiness Falls. All summaries are adapted from CountyCat, and each title is available for checkout at the library.

Happiness Falls features American-Korean biracial characters Mia, John, and Eugene; their mother Hannah Park is Korean and their father Adam Parson is American. While set primarily in the United States, there are recollections of the Parksons time living in Korea. To learn more about the history of Korea, check out:

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

Set in 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. Over the course of half a century, in a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, and heroes are persecuted, beasts take many shapes. A young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver's courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status. She befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer with a new romantic prospect of noble birth. Beasts of a Little Land is an epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter.

In Happiness Falls, the Parkson family briefly explores the possibility of using gene editing as a therapy for Eugene’s Angelman syndrome, and they touch on some of the ethical and moral questions surrounding it. For a deeper understanding of the science behind gene editing and a more thoughtful examination of how scientific advancements intersect with bioethics, check out:

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators turned ​a curiosity ​of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. In The Code Breaker, bestselling author Walter Isaacson explores the development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution.

In Happiness Falls, Adam Parsons goes missing, leaving his family worried, confused, and desperate for information on his well-being. But what happens when questions are never answered, and a missing person is gone so long they don’t even know they are a missing person anymore? Enter the dream-like reality of a labyrinth and check out:

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

In Happiness Falls, Adam Parsons develops "the Happiness Quotient," a formulaic measurement of a person's happiness based off a person's baseline expectations. Using a scale of one to 10, Adam tries to quantify happiness using numbers. If you liked the HQ formula in Happiness Falls, check out: 

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a "wonderful" husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon the “Wife Project.” In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical -- most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver … yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent, and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's “Wife Project” takes a back burner to the “Father Project,” and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

All of these books were featured in the library's AM Book Club or the PM Book Club in the past. If you enjoyed Angie Kim's Happiness Falls, and want to keep discussing books, consider joining one of our book clubs. The PM Book Club meets the first Wednesday of the month at 7:00 PM, and the AM Book Club meets the third Thursday of the month at 11:00 AM. The library book clubs are great opportunities to talk about what you’ve read, learn something new, discover topical books, and meet friends.  



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