Happy Hour: A Novel

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I could read Granados (via her protagonist, Isa) characterize human beings for an hour straight. There is something diabolically enjoyable about the ability to capture and then fillet an archetype in just a few lines. It reminds me of Hemingway, honestly, in the Parisian novels where artistic twenty-somethings take turn fashioning their own insecurities into a lashing for those around them. Reading this book is like watching a video from the party last night and wishing you'd been there. Mariah Kreutter, Soft Punk When a troubled single mother, her teenage daughter and flamboyant eight-year-old son move in next door she can’t help but become involved in their lives and becomes drawn to them. Book now: The Rum Kitchen Brixton , The Rum Kitchen Shoreditch, The Rum Kitchen Soho 214, Bermondsey

A refreshingly novel approach on how to make your life rich. Happier Hour shows you step-by-step how to wisely invest your most precious resource—time.” Franny Calderwood is an eccentric widow in her mid-sixties. Her companions are two dogs 'Whiskey' and 'Soda'. After the sudden and tragic death of her beloved husband Frank, Franny shuts herself off socially. Avoiding friends and family who want to talk about Frank, a topic too painful for Franny to discuss. Her days consist of conversations with the photos of Frank she has around the house, kitchen Frank, bedroom Frank etc. She also relishes her evening drinks and watching red carpet events, relishing the opportunity to vent her spleen on the stars and their appearance. It is entertaining to follow these two twenty-one-year-old women as they hustle their way to socialite status, flitting in and out of the NYC party scene. As poor immigrants without proper documentation, the hustling is a form of survival for them, partying their way to a free meal and cab fare. They can sense the aching want of the men in these circles and deftly manipulate and charm them, although it never seems cruel. The men, most often, are outclassed in their own games. The strength of Happy Hour is Granados’ wit and the assuredness with which she delivers on-the-nose observations and youthful wisdom.” Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. It is a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York in 2013, and it evokes that time with such sparkling specificity that you can feel the heat coming off the pavement. If you are looking for romance, ambition, glamour, and a story about what it means to be young and striving in the city, this is your song of the summer.”I’m referring to Loos’ 1925, Gatsby-contemporaneous, rampantly best-selling, critically lauded jazz age comedic novel. Not the 1950s Film Code-tempered musical adaptation with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Which has its own charms.) Happy Hour refuses to separate the frivolous and the adventurous … as refreshing as the first sip of a martini on a searing summer’s night.” And for me, where I really belong is almost never where people find me. That's something I often think about when I am met with hostility. It is never that I have done anything to warrant it; it's that I'm simply I loved Franny's family and friends who consistently rang her and asked her over, never giving up after three long years of excuses.

Happy Hour is overflowing with warmth, sensitivity, and humour. Within the story, Byron explores themes of loss, grief, guilt, forgiveness and making amends, all of which are written beautifully and ‘handled with care’. Remember, this is Jacquie Byron’s first novel, so I can’t wait to see what more this author has to offer us. Side Note:- this book might have you reflecting on your own interactions with those more senior to you in the life department.This book is an absolute gem – useful, evidence-based, and a pleasure to read. Armed with the insights conveyed in Happier Hour, we can all find greater fulfillment in the time we have.” There seems to have emerged this trend of putting unlikeable characters in relatable, everyday situations and call it societal criticism. It's occasionally done successfully (think My Year of Rest and Relaxation), but the line to Gossip Girl and Sex and the City is thin. It’s always Happy Hour’, says Melbourne born, Australian author, Jacquie Byron. And, upon finishing Byron’s debut novel appropriately titled, Happy Hour, I’m inclined to agree.

Reading this book is like watching a video from the party last night and wishing you’d been there.” A] sharp and beguiling debut ... Granados's nuanced characterization, biting observational humor and intoxicating prose make Happy Hour a delicacy to be savored, as well as a poised takedown of New York's cultural elite. Devon Ashby, Shelf AwarenessFun, decadent ... a picaresque exploration of female friendship staged across a series of tableaus set in New York City during one particularly sweltering summer in the early 2010s. Sophie Kemp, The Nation With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, this stunning debut about a young ingénue in the big city is “as refreshing as gin fizz . . . a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York” (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker). When the Salerno family - newly single mother Sallyanne, teenager Dee and eight year old Josh move in next door, Franny surprises herself by welcoming them in her life, but bad habits are hard to break, and when Franny reverts to her old ways, she must finally confront everything she has lost, to keep what she has gained. That’s more or less it. I wouldn’t have minded if Isa’s voice had been as amusing and entertaining as say the main character in Luster or My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Pretend I’m Dead or You Exist Too Much or The Idiot. It just so happens that I actively disliked Isa. This is weird given that the mcs from the novels I’ve just mentioned are not necessarily nice or kind or strictly likeable. But I found myself drawn to them all the same. Isa just pissed me off. She’s constantly painting herself as the better friend or the better person, and other characters are shown to be bad or mean or shallow. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation both the narrator and her ‘best friend’ are depicted as solipsistic, often immature, decidedly toxic people. Here instead Isa is the good guy and almost every other character is bad (because they are wealthy, white, pretentious, superficial etc.). At one point she’s at a gay bar (if i recall correctly) and someone asks her what she’s doing there and that this isn’t a place for her housemate fends him off immediately (saying something like “she’s my sister you old, white queen”). I’m not keen on authors using gay characters to ‘defend’ straight ones from other lgbtq+ people. Like, it’s okay because a gay character is telling off another gay character. He called her ‘his sister’ so that makes her what, part of the queer community?! This scene just rubbed me up the wrong way. What, Isa has a right to be in gay spaces because she has a gay friend and she’s just Not Like Other Straight People? Ma daje!

Written with warmth, sensitivity, and humour, Jacquie Byron explores grief, guilt, forgiveness and atonement in her debut novel, Happy Hour.

happy hour is both a glittering and blistering debut – following two 21 year olds, isa and gala, as they navigate a hot summer in new york with only a few dollars between them. by day, the two best friends sell clothes at a market stall, and by night they attempt to charm their way through the social circles of the city, mingling with artists, socialites, entrepreneurs, stuffy businessman, and fellow dilettantes. At the same time, this book drags way too much to be a light read about French 75s and oysters. Characters dip in and out, and I was left without an attachment to the plot or any of the characters (including the main ones). This book is trying to be two things — and ends up being neither. A] sharp and beguiling debut … Granados’s nuanced characterization, biting observational humor and intoxicating prose make Happy Hour a delicacy to be savored, as well as a poised takedown of New York’s cultural elite.” She has a lot of what people consider ‘moral fibre,’ which simply means a variety of fears instilled in you when you’re young enough to be scared.” Happy Hour is the perfect tonic … a sharp, original and intelligent take on existence’s larger themes: work, death, the meaning of life and the very structures which control it.”