2018 Beyond the Classics discussion

This is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E. Smith is a feel good book about teen romance. It’s about a teenage girl and a teenage boy that accidently find each other through a mistyped email address. The boy’s name is Graham Larkin and he is a famous movie star. Both of them don’t know each other's names but they create a friendship through corresponding through their emails.
The book switches from Ellie’s point of view to Graham’s point of view throughout the book but mostly focuses on Ellie’s. Ellie is a girl from a town in Maine who lives with her mom and helps run a tourist shop her mom runs. It is summer in the small maine town during the book. Graham Larkin is working on a new movie and needs a location to film the movie. He chooses to convince the producers to film in her hometown partly because it is a good filming location and the other part was so he could finally meet who he was talking to. The only problem is that they don’t know each other's names or what the other looks like. They both have secrets about themselves that the other doesn’t know and finding out could hurt their friendship and being together could hurt relationships they have with the people already in their lives.Ellie’s dad is a famous politician and she is the result of an affair he had with her mom. The scandal was really big so Ellie’s mom moved them to Maine. Ellie's fear is people finding out about the truth of her dad do to Graham’s popularity. She kept this secret her whole life and never told anyone so if it gets out it can ruin relationships she has created there. Graham also has to keep a reputation and keep his popularity. His agent is pushing him to date his co star while all he wants to do is find the girl that is the one thing that is actually really making him happy in his life. The book focuses on what happy is for people and its seen throughout the whole story. One of the first emails asks what happy is for them and they respond with lists of what makes them happy. The story hits some of the points made on those lists. The book is a complicated love story about people’s happiness and how someone’s happiness can hurt someone else.
The book is a lovely romantic story but it is pretty predictable. You know what is going to happen you know when there is going to be a sad part or if it’s happy. Throughout the whole book every happy part gets ruined by something going wrong. By the end you get used to it and know if there is a happy part it will soon get ruined. It is a cliche love story though and ends happy but sometimes cliche is what we need to read. Happy endings are always good because we do not always get them in real life.