Happy Hour: A Novel

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Whenever I’m on the subway or walking in the street alone, there’s a constant feeling of being in display. It’s a feeling I’ve never felt so strongly anywhere else.

As with Loos’ book and many good socially critical yet comedic works, its social criticism is lightly and artfully applied primarily around the privileged, (mostly) rich, (mostly) white, and/or (mostly) male patrons and benefactors of Isa and Gala and the hoity-toity scenes they haunt, and especially via the steady stream of microaggressions - sexist, racist, classist, the assumptions, underestimations, and misconceptions - that the heroines must routinely dodge and navigate in their efforts to tour NYC and feed themselves socially, culturally, and literally. (Preferably caviar.)Happy Hour is less a conventional coming-of-age story and more a flâneuse adventure...[it's] unique for portraying young women having fun without looming threats of moral or mortal punishment. Esmé Hogeveen, GARAGE Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. I asked him about his business, how long he had lived in the city, who his last girlfriend was—because most people in New York are happy to be invited to diatribe.” Happy Hour is less a conventional coming-of-age story and more a flâneuse adventure…[it’s] unique for portraying young women having fun without looming threats of moral or mortal punishment.”

Granados does a masterful job at touching on race and class without hitting the reader over the head with overused tropes or stale language.” Marlowe Granados writes with a delicious joy and confidence. She conveys frivolity without being frivolous, and describes the adventures and degradations of the lives of her characters with an intelligent distance and effervescence that is such a pleasure to read.” 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. Isa Epley, all of twenty-one years old, is already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York with her newly blond best friend looking for adventure. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them. 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.” Written with warmth, sensitivity, and humour, Jacquie Byron explores grief, guilt, forgiveness and atonement in her debut novel, Happy Hour. 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. Eloise Hendy, Elephant I ran up the stairs to wake Gala because she has a true appreciation for department stores; she calls them Free Museums. She really sprang out of bed, which I have never seen her do.”