What do you think?
Rate this book
A Way to Be Happy
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A middle-aged husband, bewildered by his failing marriage, redirects his anxiety toward a routine colonoscopy. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation. A Russian hitman suffering from a mysterious lung ailment retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In stories about disparate characters grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary, Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how we so often seem to understand it through our encounters with the lives, and the stories, of others.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A middle-aged husband, bewildered by his failing marriage, redirects his anxiety toward a routine colonoscopy. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation. A Russian hitman suffering from a mysterious lung ailment retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In stories about disparate characters grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary, Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how we so often seem to understand it through our encounters with the lives, and the stories, of others.
- GenresShort StoriesCanada
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 2024
10 people are currently reading
239 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Adderson
55 books78 followersCaroline Adderson grew up in Alberta. After traveling around Canada, she moved to B.C. to go to university and has mostly lived there ever since. She started writing seriously after university, eventually going on to write two internationally published novels (A History of Forgetting and Sitting Practice) and two collections of short stories for adults (Bad Imaginings and Pleased To Meet You). When her son was five, she began writing seriously unserious books for young readers (Very Serious Children; I, Bruno;and Bruno For Real). Her contribution to the Single Voice series is her first really serious book for young readers and her first book for teens.
Caroline’s work has received numerous prize nominations including the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A two-time Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and three-time CBC Literary Award winner, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award, given annually to an outstanding female writer in mid-career in recognition of her body of work. She also won the 2009 Diamond Willow Award—voted on by lots of nice kids in Saskatchewan—for her children’s novel Very Serious Children.
Caroline keeps writing for readers of all ages every day. She also does a little teaching at Simon Fraser University and hangs out with her husband, a filmmaker, their 10-year-old son, and their naughty dog, Mickey, a Jack Russell terrier who is very lucky to be cute or she would never get away with all she does. Caroline’s advice to young writers is to read, read, read and write, write, write, and never get a Jack Russell terrier.
Caroline’s work has received numerous prize nominations including the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A two-time Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and three-time CBC Literary Award winner, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award, given annually to an outstanding female writer in mid-career in recognition of her body of work. She also won the 2009 Diamond Willow Award—voted on by lots of nice kids in Saskatchewan—for her children’s novel Very Serious Children.
Caroline keeps writing for readers of all ages every day. She also does a little teaching at Simon Fraser University and hangs out with her husband, a filmmaker, their 10-year-old son, and their naughty dog, Mickey, a Jack Russell terrier who is very lucky to be cute or she would never get away with all she does. Caroline’s advice to young writers is to read, read, read and write, write, write, and never get a Jack Russell terrier.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 14, 2025
Rating: 3.5
A number of these stories were too oblique and their conclusions too ambiguous for me to be satisfied. I felt the author sometimes failed to provide essential information that would have made the stories meaningful. (This is most evident in the story “Yolki-Palki” in which a Russian hitman who’s come to the US on assignment has baffling childhood memories well up. These appear to be connected with the painful lung ailment or tumour he’s enduring. I found the story quite inaccessible.)
For me, in the best short stories the prose and the details provided should not frustrate so much as open up my understanding of the characters. As a reader, I don’t want to be expending excessive mental energy figuring out what the writer is talking about; I want to focus on the characters, their situations, and the significance of them. The “mystery” should lie in those things. I become annoyed by arty cleverness, being tasked with connecting dots when too many of the dots (critical pieces of information) are missing. I read some of these stories twice and still couldn’t crack the code.
Here are summaries of a couple of the stories:
Two heroin addicts, Cory and Taryn, in fancy (stolen) dress crash New Year’s parties, with the aim of stealing wallets from coats. Taryn, however, is uncomfortable with this scheme. She seems to want to change her life, apparently a sad one including a history in the child welfare system. A mother and baby sitting among the coats contribute to this sense. The story is inconclusive, but the reader has the sense that Taryn can’t pull herself out of the rut she is in.
Ketman runs a landscaping business. He’s estranged from his son and his wife evidently doesn’t like him. He fears undergoing a colonoscopy for an insurance company physical. Not long ago, his mother, who (he feels) is the only person who really loved him died of a pulmonary embolism after a routine laparoscopic knee surgery. He’s afraid he’ll die too. Variously perceived as a bully, a redneck, and an intensely heteronormative male who’s distressed by the very thought of a scope entering his lower intestine. He agrees to the procedure, only if he’s knocked out. As it turns out, he isn’t. He can actually watch the scope move through his bowel. As is often the case for me with short stories, the conclusion seemed frustratingly ambiguous. It’s unclear whether cancer was detected or if the scary thing for Ketman is simply undergoing the procedure.
A number of these stories were too oblique and their conclusions too ambiguous for me to be satisfied. I felt the author sometimes failed to provide essential information that would have made the stories meaningful. (This is most evident in the story “Yolki-Palki” in which a Russian hitman who’s come to the US on assignment has baffling childhood memories well up. These appear to be connected with the painful lung ailment or tumour he’s enduring. I found the story quite inaccessible.)
For me, in the best short stories the prose and the details provided should not frustrate so much as open up my understanding of the characters. As a reader, I don’t want to be expending excessive mental energy figuring out what the writer is talking about; I want to focus on the characters, their situations, and the significance of them. The “mystery” should lie in those things. I become annoyed by arty cleverness, being tasked with connecting dots when too many of the dots (critical pieces of information) are missing. I read some of these stories twice and still couldn’t crack the code.
Here are summaries of a couple of the stories:
Two heroin addicts, Cory and Taryn, in fancy (stolen) dress crash New Year’s parties, with the aim of stealing wallets from coats. Taryn, however, is uncomfortable with this scheme. She seems to want to change her life, apparently a sad one including a history in the child welfare system. A mother and baby sitting among the coats contribute to this sense. The story is inconclusive, but the reader has the sense that Taryn can’t pull herself out of the rut she is in.
Ketman runs a landscaping business. He’s estranged from his son and his wife evidently doesn’t like him. He fears undergoing a colonoscopy for an insurance company physical. Not long ago, his mother, who (he feels) is the only person who really loved him died of a pulmonary embolism after a routine laparoscopic knee surgery. He’s afraid he’ll die too. Variously perceived as a bully, a redneck, and an intensely heteronormative male who’s distressed by the very thought of a scope entering his lower intestine. He agrees to the procedure, only if he’s knocked out. As it turns out, he isn’t. He can actually watch the scope move through his bowel. As is often the case for me with short stories, the conclusion seemed frustratingly ambiguous. It’s unclear whether cancer was detected or if the scary thing for Ketman is simply undergoing the procedure.
January 6, 2025
Whenever a new adult book or story collection comes out by Caroline Adderson, I always jump at the chance to read it. A Way to be Happy is her latest release, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize earlier this year. Most of her books have come out quietly, and it continually astounds me how such a fantastic writer like Adderson can be unknown to so many Canadian readers, especially considering how impressive her biography reads; she’s been nominated for almost every literary prize out there, both locally and internationally. She excels at various forms of writing for both kids and adults, but her short stories are some of my favourites, so I was delighted to have this collection appear on my doorstep a few months ago.
Book Summary
At approximately 220 pages, there are only 8 stories in this collection, so we get a significant amount of time to meet and marinate in the characters’ lives. “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone” follows a couple as they flit between New Years parties in apartment buildings, stealing purses and jackets from the mass of coats that are inevitably thrown into bedrooms for safekeeping. “The Procedure” is a story of a middle-aged man who frets about an upcoming medical procedure that he treats as a life-altering event. “Homing” is the story of a woman who temporarily relocates to a rental house that turns out to be a special stop for particular pet pigeons. “Started Early, Took My Dog” is the tale of a lesbian couple living on Vancouver Island, tormented by a man in a red truck who seems intent on lurking on the peripheries of their life. “Charity” is one of my favourites; it details the struggles of a young man who is desperate to understand the coldness of his mother, ends up on the streets, but then rescued by a silly misunderstanding he made as a young child. “From the Archives of the Hospital For the Insane” is one of the longer stories, written about a psychiatric sanitorium in the early 1900s and some of the patients that were admitted there. As you can tell, Adderson uses an impressively wide range of voices and situations in this collection.
My Thoughts
Believable characters and voices is a way I often judge a book’s writing, and Adderson excels at this. “Started Early, Took My Dog” is in intriguing story; it blurs into a work of suspense and the twist at the end is incredibly unexpected, but leaves the reader on a cliffhanger too. Being a female who lives in Vancouver herself, it likely wasn’t a stretch for Adderson to put herself in those characters shoes, so perhaps it’s not as indicative of her skills. However, “The Procedure” definitely does; it’s written from the perspective of an emotionally closed-off middle-aged man, and his inner thoughts and beliefs about his wife of many years seemed to imply that they had grown apart, or that he didn’t understand her at all. I suspect these reflections are something many men feel but are not willing to admit, and I found it incredibly perceptive that Adderson was able to tap into this male psyche in this way (of course keeping in mind that I’m also a woman, so I could be way off here, but it would be interesting to see what a man thought of this story).
“Charity” is another story that I found impressive for its character development. We follow the main character Robbie from a young boy through to his early twenties as he struggles with maturing into a young man under the critical, hawkish gaze of his mother. He’s overweight, bullied regularly and suffers from regular cold sores that erupt around his mouth so his self-esteem is low to begin with. To cope, he smokes copious amounts of weed, but has managed to hide this until his mother eventually kicks him out of the house. He has a girlfriend for a short period of time and they are deeply in love, but he makes a mistake (a somewhat funny one) and she immediately breaks up with him. Robbie continues heartbroken, in search of a family member who at the very least understands him. He doesn’t find this family member unfortunately, but there is hope. The way this 28-page story unfolds continually surprised me, but the depiction of this young man and his challenges felt so genuine to me, it elicited a true feeling of sympathy as I followed him through his young life.
Short stories can be difficult to sell to people, but I’ll always recommend an simple, well-written collection like this one. Adderson has much to offer readers here in Canada and abroad, and I encourage everyone to check out her impressive body of work.
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
Book Summary
At approximately 220 pages, there are only 8 stories in this collection, so we get a significant amount of time to meet and marinate in the characters’ lives. “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone” follows a couple as they flit between New Years parties in apartment buildings, stealing purses and jackets from the mass of coats that are inevitably thrown into bedrooms for safekeeping. “The Procedure” is a story of a middle-aged man who frets about an upcoming medical procedure that he treats as a life-altering event. “Homing” is the story of a woman who temporarily relocates to a rental house that turns out to be a special stop for particular pet pigeons. “Started Early, Took My Dog” is the tale of a lesbian couple living on Vancouver Island, tormented by a man in a red truck who seems intent on lurking on the peripheries of their life. “Charity” is one of my favourites; it details the struggles of a young man who is desperate to understand the coldness of his mother, ends up on the streets, but then rescued by a silly misunderstanding he made as a young child. “From the Archives of the Hospital For the Insane” is one of the longer stories, written about a psychiatric sanitorium in the early 1900s and some of the patients that were admitted there. As you can tell, Adderson uses an impressively wide range of voices and situations in this collection.
My Thoughts
Believable characters and voices is a way I often judge a book’s writing, and Adderson excels at this. “Started Early, Took My Dog” is in intriguing story; it blurs into a work of suspense and the twist at the end is incredibly unexpected, but leaves the reader on a cliffhanger too. Being a female who lives in Vancouver herself, it likely wasn’t a stretch for Adderson to put herself in those characters shoes, so perhaps it’s not as indicative of her skills. However, “The Procedure” definitely does; it’s written from the perspective of an emotionally closed-off middle-aged man, and his inner thoughts and beliefs about his wife of many years seemed to imply that they had grown apart, or that he didn’t understand her at all. I suspect these reflections are something many men feel but are not willing to admit, and I found it incredibly perceptive that Adderson was able to tap into this male psyche in this way (of course keeping in mind that I’m also a woman, so I could be way off here, but it would be interesting to see what a man thought of this story).
“Charity” is another story that I found impressive for its character development. We follow the main character Robbie from a young boy through to his early twenties as he struggles with maturing into a young man under the critical, hawkish gaze of his mother. He’s overweight, bullied regularly and suffers from regular cold sores that erupt around his mouth so his self-esteem is low to begin with. To cope, he smokes copious amounts of weed, but has managed to hide this until his mother eventually kicks him out of the house. He has a girlfriend for a short period of time and they are deeply in love, but he makes a mistake (a somewhat funny one) and she immediately breaks up with him. Robbie continues heartbroken, in search of a family member who at the very least understands him. He doesn’t find this family member unfortunately, but there is hope. The way this 28-page story unfolds continually surprised me, but the depiction of this young man and his challenges felt so genuine to me, it elicited a true feeling of sympathy as I followed him through his young life.
Short stories can be difficult to sell to people, but I’ll always recommend an simple, well-written collection like this one. Adderson has much to offer readers here in Canada and abroad, and I encourage everyone to check out her impressive body of work.
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
To read the rest of my reviews, please visit my blog:
https://ivereadthis.com/
May 18, 2025
Short stories are a tricky space. The author must get the reader engaged early in the characters and situation and resist the urge to answer everything – to close off every angle of the story. A short story collection also must have variety; each story should stand on its own, without reminiscence of the other stories (except for thematic links). When done poorly, the stories can be a slog, where the reader flips ahead to see what’s next or sighs with disappointment when a story turns out to be too like a previous one.
In reading the book jacket and author bio, I was surprised to find a local author with such an impressive resume that I’d never heard of. I was wary – was this just marketing? Thankfully, I eventually got over my hesitation, and dove in. This book was a delight, and a marvelous story collection. The theme is the search for happiness in the most ordinary sense – not joy, with all its attendant fireworks and drama, but ordinary happiness, even just in the form of lack of sadness. The characters are seeking a place beyond their current worries, struggles, and fears that will bring them peace, calm, and – well – happiness; even it not what most people would see as “happy”, for them it is.
Some of my favourite story collections were one-offs. Fierce by Hannah Holborn, The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan, Table for Two by Amor Towles (although he may write more). They are true gems of books that encourage revisiting over time, with images and elements that stick with me. This book will now live on that list.
I was pleased to find that Adderson has several other books available, including some novels that look interesting. I’ll check those out sometime.
In reading the book jacket and author bio, I was surprised to find a local author with such an impressive resume that I’d never heard of. I was wary – was this just marketing? Thankfully, I eventually got over my hesitation, and dove in. This book was a delight, and a marvelous story collection. The theme is the search for happiness in the most ordinary sense – not joy, with all its attendant fireworks and drama, but ordinary happiness, even just in the form of lack of sadness. The characters are seeking a place beyond their current worries, struggles, and fears that will bring them peace, calm, and – well – happiness; even it not what most people would see as “happy”, for them it is.
Some of my favourite story collections were one-offs. Fierce by Hannah Holborn, The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan, Table for Two by Amor Towles (although he may write more). They are true gems of books that encourage revisiting over time, with images and elements that stick with me. This book will now live on that list.
I was pleased to find that Adderson has several other books available, including some novels that look interesting. I’ll check those out sometime.
May 11, 2025
I don’t truly understand how books like this get published. I don’t see the redeeming features.
- the language is off. It felt like it was trying too hard the whole time.
- the supposed connection to finding happiness was stretched at best. If this book is supposed to be about happiness I don’t trust anyone involved in the process.
- there was this constant reaching towards the magical that never landed. It felt like the narrators were supposed to be untrustworthy and like the stories all odd to make readers question themselves… but mostly it was just annoying because it was poorly done. I don’t want to reread paragraphs or pages just because the author hasn’t done her job.
- the language is off. It felt like it was trying too hard the whole time.
- the supposed connection to finding happiness was stretched at best. If this book is supposed to be about happiness I don’t trust anyone involved in the process.
- there was this constant reaching towards the magical that never landed. It felt like the narrators were supposed to be untrustworthy and like the stories all odd to make readers question themselves… but mostly it was just annoying because it was poorly done. I don’t want to reread paragraphs or pages just because the author hasn’t done her job.
October 2, 2025
The last half a page of every story was good, but I never really liked any of the story up until that point. Except for the last story about the Hospital for the Insane, that one I liked except for the ending.
Not everyone who writes short stories is good at short stories and despite my ambivalence to this collection, they are actually well done, well written, and great examples of the short format. Just not my kind of subject matter I guess.
Not everyone who writes short stories is good at short stories and despite my ambivalence to this collection, they are actually well done, well written, and great examples of the short format. Just not my kind of subject matter I guess.
February 5, 2025
Although I’m a huge lover of Canadian literature, Caroline Anderson was unknown to me.
I can’t say I really enjoyed these stories. They were dark and somewhat depressing and often for me convoluted. Obscure Objects was the one I liked the most. It made the most sense. I have but have yet to read ‘A History of Forgetting’. I’ll see …..
I can’t say I really enjoyed these stories. They were dark and somewhat depressing and often for me convoluted. Obscure Objects was the one I liked the most. It made the most sense. I have but have yet to read ‘A History of Forgetting’. I’ll see …..
October 14, 2024
I'm giving this three stars because I honestly couldn't finish it. I'm in awe of Caroline Adderson's abilities as a writer, but I'm tired of seeing the r-word casually tossed off in fiction. It's so hurtful and heartbreaking and honestly disappointing. It's 2024 and we need to stop doing this.
May 8, 2025
These short stories feature some pathetic and miserable characters at depressing times in their lives. Although I did enjoy some of Adderson's phrasing, I found the stories to be not quite fully formed, often ending so abruptly that I thought I had missed a page.
August 18, 2025
Meh. I saw the potential in the stories and characters, but overall I felt unsatisfied after every story ended. I am all for an obscure ending, especially in a short story, but most of the stories didn’t feel purposefully obscure, like they ended 1 paragraph too soon. 🤷♀️
October 29, 2024
Extraordinary moving brilliant book by one of my favourite authors.
January 7, 2025
same vibe as Ellen in Pieces - extremely observational and yet light
January 18, 2025
Loved the stories in this book. My favourite was the one about the pigeons and how they brought a community together during COVID. If you love short fiction, this is a must read.
April 6, 2025
The quality of short story varies widely, and I was hoping for a coherent theme or a multi story wrap up. The ends are abrupt but the characters fully defined.
September 21, 2025
An interesting selection of short stories. Some I loved while others left me somewhat baffled by their idea of happiness!
August 10, 2024
These stories are bold, unexpected and witty. The odd conflicts that the characters face in the pursuit of happiness bring Adderson’s characters to life.
July 11, 2025
Just finished the first story, and am left baffled. The story has so many holes. Incoherent and unsatisfying. The ending ambiguous. I'm not sure if I want to read on...but I will. Reading on, I upped my rating to 2. These are short stories and you're left hanging once you get to know the characters and get to the end. You are left speculating how life turns out. I'm perplexed by the title. Finished now, and am happy to leave this book behind. I wouldn't recommend it.
November 29, 2024
Arg, I've just started reading this book and realized that the blurb gives away the plot of a story that's meant to be a surprise, I think. Sometimes blurbs take all the fun out of reading. Sometimes Grinches steal more than Christmas. There were a few winners here, only a few, but they were spectacular - "Homing" was charming and could have gone on for much longer - and "Charity" had a great main character and was worth reading. I think this is one I'll pick up again at a later date and give the rest of the stories a fairer amount of my time. 3 stars.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews