“Sarah Dunn is a wise and brilliant writer who doesn’t sacrifice emotional complexity for low humor – she gives you both.” "Holly Frick is the kind of character many women readers will immediately identify with. Not because she’s reeling from a humiliating divorce from a man she still loves and shooting blanks in the brutal dating world, which she is. Not because she adopts a dog with brain cancer or tries to talk her married friend out of an affair. It’s because the hapless protagonist of this topical novel is such a clever observer of modern life, offering a wealth of Exacto-sharp theories that echo sentiments we may feel but would hesitate to express. Sex still surprises Holly as something that’s “so darn intimate”; she suspects she’s “stuck in an abusive relationship” with New York City; and she balks at Buddhism because she “can’t get behind a religion that doesn’t have a God.” Charming and approaching Tina-Fey funny, Dunn, whose first novel was The Big Love (no connection to the HBO series), combines crackling dialogue and absurdly real-feeling scenarios to create a big-city smart, yet universally appealing, little gem." “Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness zips along hilariously, fueled by pitch-perfect dialogue…[It] is an antic urban comedy, with enough neurotic characters to fill the cast of a Woody Allen movie. It's great fun.” "Secrets to Happiness is smart, bitingly funny, laced with sitcom-sharp dialogue and bittersweet." “Sarah Dunn… mixes in extra ingredients like faith and spirituality that turn her books into a literary feast that few of her counterparts manage.” "Ms. Dunn shuttles her characters around New York with deft precision, weaving their lives together seamlessly." "Secrets...makes for good, sharp fun." "Witty, insightful...Bumping it up to the top of its chick-lit genre is Dunn's writing style -- clever, subtle, and engaging." “A savory treat” packed with “dogs, divorce and dizzying dysfunction.” "I love this book. Sarah Dunn is very funny, that's the first thing to say. But she is also deep, interesting and subtle. Her characters could be my friends and yet they utterly surprise me. She is so smart about life and society and the complex and contradictory ways our hearts behave. "Oh that is so true." As I read Secrets to Happiness, I found myself thinking that again and again and again." "Dunn charts several New Yorkers' lives in this snappy novel..... the energetic and witty prose speeds along the narrative. It's smarter than the usual single-in-the-city fare, and funnier, too." |