Happily

Reviews

“With milk teeth, bread crumbs, pebbles, and tears, Sabrina Orah Mark illumines the outermost expanses of motherhood’s chaos, cruelty, and love. She confidently wields the weird logic of the fairy tale; bewitched, I didn’t even try to distinguish the real from the unreal. I just wanted to follow this thrillingly distinctive book wherever it went.”—Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People

“Who is this stunning sorceress of love and lightness and language wrapped around the heavy? We are so lucky to have her to consider the world with us. This book is going onto my fairy-tale class syllabus pronto but beyond the tales it’s also such a powerful investigation of motherhood, of personhood, chock-full of truly amazing associations. A keeper.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Butterfly Lampshade

“Sabrina Orah Mark’s lapidary sentences hitched together can make us understand fairy tales better but not by any means so obvious as explaining them. These are fairy tales that are essays on fairy tales but also incantations, confessions, news analysis, personal history, and reminders that fairy tales are dainty things capable of doing a lot of heavy lifting of the contents of our imaginations and the aches of our hearts. Which is my long-winded way of saying: Amazing! Gorgeous! Read this!”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Waking Beauty and Men Explain Things to Me

“You will remember the day, hour and minute you finish Happily. And it might remember you. Magic does live here. Sabrina Orah Mark has actually remade our childhoods by taking so seriously the world we’ve made as adults. Easily one of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“Happily . . . is a bubbling cauldron filled with ingredients as diverse as parenting and premonitions, mythological creatures and marriage, mothers and sons and fairies and witches, and always there is magic. . . . Mark’s essays . . . often [end] somewhere far from where the reader may have expected; however, it is always exactly as it should be.”—Shelf Awareness

“Each [essay] sums up a different fairy tale, or set of tales, making clever, lyrical, sometimes-disturbing connections . . . Sprinkle these clever essays like breadcrumbs through the forest of your days.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[Sabrina Orah] Mark writes with profound curiosity, attentive awe, and a poet’s magnifying vision. Seamlessly, [her] imagination makes new the ancient and oft-told.”—Booklist

“In her probing memoir-in-essays, Mark uses fairy tales as framing devices to unpack a range of topics including motherhood, marriage, racism, and mortality. . . . Mark’s sharp analysis captures the ‘cultural resilience’ of fairy tales, and her writing hums with lyrical self-reflection. . . . Readers will find this full of insight.”—Publishers Weekly Expand reviews