Cheri Matzer is an ex-NYPD academic in Chicago, trying to get pregnant although she and her older husband, Michael, are not getting along particularly well. Cheri's father Sol has died, and her mother Cici calls frequently from New York. How Cheri arrived at her present - in which she worries over the safety of precious tablets in the Baghdad museum in advance of the U.S. invasion or Iraq, faces a student complaint, and learns that Michael has cancer - is revealed slowly, going back to a childhood trip to Italy to visit her mother's family, where Cheri learned she was adopted.

Grieving and unsure how to move forward, Cheri allows Cici to help her, then goes to California and meets someone to whom she unburdens herself, finally telling the story of how she left the NYPD.

See also: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Quotes

Everything she cares about is in plain sight but out of reach... (128)

...the kind of pity that eventually provokes cruelty. (136)

It is amazing the things we think we cannot do and then when the time comes, it is so easy. (147)

"There, see, we are a happy family," Mama says, giving Cheri one of those big hugs that gets tighter when she tries to pull away. (family portrait, 194)

Cici's helplessness infuriates her and makes her cruel. (267)

"We can look at everything we go through without judging it as good or bad but as an opportunity for growth." (275)

She is an insect caught in the amber of waiting. (291)

"Some things are so painful we must look away to go on. But when we turn back, we can be surprised." (Cici, 311)

"I can't feel anything, and when I do, it's all too much." (Cheri, 314)

If life is a river, we can see only a small patch of it. A little in front of us, some behind. (388) ( )

HAPPY FAMILY.....the title alone sent my mind racing. The closest i came to ever having one was at a Chinese restaurant and ordering it as a meal..... So what constitutes a 'happy family' ? This book has it all....dysfunction, adoption, humor, sadness, personal searching, religious beliefs, and psychological awakening.
It has a LOT all poured into one story.
Others have given a total story-line so i will refrain. But i do wonder if family and happy can ultimately be used one phrase?! Read Barones book to get her take on it!
** please allow me to quote the following cuz i loved it..." We are capable of such great acts. We rise up even when our legs are almost to weak to hold on. We claw our way out of the darkness and isolation with just he memory of light to guide us. We are all so vulnerable, so close to nothingness, and yet we survive." ( )

It's 1962 and a young girl in labor walks into a clinic in Trenton, NJ and gives birth to a baby girl. A young Jewish doctor goes to Milan for a conference and sees a beautiful Italian girl and falls so completely in love that he converts to the Catholic religion. They get married and he brings his young bride to Manhattan. Forty years later and that baby girl, Cheri Matzner is grown up and floundering. She's a former cop, now a college teacher and trying to have a baby with her mostly uninterested older husband. These are some pretty damaged people and while the book took a little while to draw me in, once it did, I had to finish it. It's about life and how it's never what you expect. Definitely recommended. ( )

Wonderful book. ( )

A young girl gives birth to a baby and walks out of the clinic. That baby is adopted by a couple unable to have a child of their own. Decades later, Cheri Matzner is all grown up but nothing in her life is going quite as well as she'd like.

Work, her marriage, and dealing with her well-meaning but overbearing mother are all sources of strife as she nears her 40th birthday. She's a former cop and current orofessor, and the details in this novel are so well researched and thoroughly described that they paint a vivid, realistic picture. Happy Family examines familial bonds and asks whether we can ever see our parents as complex people beyond the simple scope of parenthood, and if doing so would change the way we perceive our history.

Written with considerable emotional intelligence and some very clever humor, it’s hard to believe this is Tracy Barone's first novel.

I was able to read an advanced galley of Happy Family for honest review courtesy of Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company. ( )