I won this book from LibraryThings and for the life of me, I can't figure out what intrigued me enough to enter the contest.

This novel is a mish mosh of impossible situations. The plot is unbelievable with the readers having to do a lot more than suspend their belief. The subject matter of a cartoonist on the hit list of radical extremest Muslims, a la Charlie Hebdo, is not funny, yet this novel is billed as a 'humorous' read.

I found no humor in this book, which opens with a very depressing scene (and you then read about the events that lead up to that scene). The impression I got about the author from that first chapter was "wow, this guy is a bit twisted".

It was a strange almost surreal read and I finished it only because I thought that eventually it would lighten up and have some form of comic relief interspersed within what is a very dreary story. No one seemed to be very happy.

Uninteresting characters coupled with a twisted plot gave this book only 2 stars. However, I did enjoy the author's use of run on sentences as a means of conveying a character's thought process; you know, how you're thinking what to wear to work tomorrow and end up wondering how Joseph Stalin died. When the characters had those moments the novel seemed to come to life. ( )

The Happiest People In The World
by Brock Clarke

Thank you Alqonquin Press and NetGalley.com for the advanced e-copy of this book.

When I requested an advance readers copy of this book I was unfamiliar with the author but I wanted something to read that would entertain me. The colorful artwork on the cover and the title, "The Happiest People In The World", seemed a good possibility.

Researching the author, I learned he has a book entitled, "The Arsonists Guide to Writer's Homes in New England". How could you not want to read his next book?

Brock Clarke when asked about his newest project (in an interview with Micah Riecker In Hobart) said, "I am, actually, working on a new novel. It's called "The Happiest People in the World," about a guy (based loosely on the Danish cartoonist who caused the shit storm by drawing the prophet with a bomb under his turban) who goes into hiding in upstate New York (Boonville, to be precise) and becomes a high school guidance counselor, and then, hit men still on his tail, has to flee back to Denmark, whose citizens are, according to a real life study, the happiest people in the world."

There's the rough outline to your story in a nutshell. And I do mean a "nut shell".

This quirky novel begins when a hapless cartoonist, Jens Baedrup, from a small town Danish newspaper is asked to create a cartoon. His job is to depict the reaction of the Danish people to an outrageous and inflammatory cartoon of the prophet with a bomb under his turban that had been published elsewhere in Denmark and had caused world-wide bloodshed. His mistake was inserting the original cartoon within his cartoon.

The local backlash to Baedrup's cartoon starts a cascade of events with an international cast of screwed up characters that travels throughout Europe eventually crossing the Atlantic and landing in a small community in New York State.

This "slapstick" comedy has you second guessing everything and everyone. Take a drop or two of factual reality and create a miasma of chaos around it. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Can people be both at the same time? Is anyone really who they say they are? How can what goes on in the mind be so radically different from actions and reactions?

If you can handle Gilligan's Island blended with a little warped James Bond style international drama, this book is for you.
( )

This book was touted as a thriller spy novel, but I found it to be less about spies and more about the Witness Protection Program. When a cartoonist from Denmark publishes an offensive cartoon about Muslims, he finds himself and his family in danger of being assassinated. With the help of the American CIA, he decides to pretend he died in a housefire and flees to upstate New York and assumes a new life and name. The female CIA agent sets him up in a small town where she had an affair with the high school principal years prior, and gets him a job as the high school counselor. Additional CIA agents are already in-place undercover in this town who can protect the cartoonist, should he ever be discovered. Not really spy story, right? The biggest problem I had with this entire books was that every single character was over-the-top wacky. I understand this was meant as a satire, perhaps even comic booky judging by the book cover, but you can't have every single character be zanier than the next or nothing is as crazy as you are trying to make it. Either that, or you have a bunch of random characters and activities that don't make a lot of sense, which is kind of what I thought this book was much of the time; crazy for crazy's sake. Thank you for the copy via LibraryThing. ( )

At the urging of his newspaper editor, hapless Danish political cartoonist Jens Baedrup published a somewhat disrespectful drawing of Mohammed the Prophet. End result: Jens's house was torched, apparently by "Islamic fundamentalists", and he is presumed dead. He isn't actually dead, however. Instead, for his own protection, he is spirited away by an operative of the CIA to a small town in upstate New York. A stranger in a strange land, Jens changes his name to Henry, tells everyone he is Swedish, and tries to settle into his new life. Here's the unfortunate part: no one Jens/Henry meets is who they appear to be and everyone has an ulterior motive.

Brock Clarke's novel begins and ends with a bloodbath -- the same bloodbath, to be sure, but told from differing perspectives. The journey to that bloodbath is quirky, disconcerting, and filled with oddly poetic moments and disturbingly charming characters: Matty, the high school principal who also owns the town's most popular drinking establishment; Locs, the CIA operative still in love with Matty despite his return to his wife; Ellen, Matty's wife, who runs the bar and yearns for her husband to be someone other than who he is; Kurt, their teenage son, who might possibly be smarter than his parents although he hasn't figured that out yet; and a host of other idiosyncratic individuals, young and old, who make up the population of this tiny hotbed of intrigue.

Tight prose, simple straightforward sentences, great plot, great characters. I should have loved this book.

Here's the reason this is only three stars: its overweening self-conscious irony, almost like the author imbued his prose with a subtext that gloats, "Hahahah, look how clever I am!" And he is clever, but was it necessary to be so self-congratulatory about it?

Or maybe it's just that my sense of hipster sophistication is lacking.

Thank you to LibraryThing's Early Reviewers for the opportunity to read this book. ( )

While this is an easy read it does also require some attention to detail. Those who read just to turn pages and enjoy the basic plot will find themselves lost and confused. If, however, one simply reads for the enjoyment of the written word and because she enjoys interacting with a text, this is not at all confusing. Yes, spies (of course) have multiple names and in this version of small town America so do the regular (?) citizens.

Briefly, a newspaper cartoonist is tasked with drawing a cartoon addressing the turmoil from a previous (true life) contest to draw a religious-based cartoon. When the expected response occurs, it sets in motion the story of the cartoonist faking his death and ultimately living in upstate New York. This is a horribly over-simplified synopsis but I find the temptation to include too much detail too hard to resist if I attempt a better one.

While the humor is often dark there are some laugh out loud moments (the email exchange is a memorable example). I would like to, and likely will within a couple weeks, elaborate on what I found most compelling in this novel. But for now I simply want to offer one of many ways to understand this novel. Throughout the book there are people being manipulated, from the cartoonist from the very beginning to just about everyone in the small town. Additionally, when any character seems sure of achieving what will make him or her happy, they are usually mistaken, often in a heartbreaking manner. Things are not what they seem most of the time and while the circumstances of the novel may be farfetched, the basic human tendency to doubt, speculate, hypothesize and generally just be unsure about things is at the heart of the story. Short of giving away too much, I will leave this rather cryptic explanation as a potential entry point for readers to consider. When I write a more complete review I will add a link to it.

I highly recommend this book to readers who, even in their humor reading, like to be challenged to think about concepts beyond the basic plot. Be prepared to consider current cultural/religious areas of contention as well as our basic human tendencies as they apply to family, life and love. There is plenty to consider so jump in!

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing. ( )