praise for The Underside of Joy
Washington Independent Review of Books
Review by Ginsy Hawkins
"The reader may cry, get a little angry and wish to be right smack dab in the middle of Elbow, California so that he or she can hug the children, pat a few characters on the back and have a good long look at a reclusive painter's artwork. The story is vibrant with clear prose and the reader feels close enough to head west to the Capozzis' general store so they can fill handmade baskets with sumptuous food and find a place to picnic." ... more
Dallas Morning News
Review by Joy Tipping
"Halverson’s accomplished, easily flowing prose completely belies the book’s debut status...The legal and emotional issues surrounding the rights of stepparents vs. parents get a thorough, but hardly clinical, airing here, with no easy heroes or villains, despite how clear-cut things seem initially." ... more
Library Journal (Starred Review)
Review by Beth E. Anderson
"Halverson’s gloriously down-to-earth novel is so pitch perfect that as readers reluctantly reach the last page, wanting more, they will have to take it on faith that this really is her first fiction." ... more
Bookpage (Fiction Top Pick)
Review by Carla Jean Whitley
"...As she mines the family secrets her characters hold close and how those affect their relationships with one another, Halverson proves she’s a wordsmith and a storyteller to keep an eye on." ... more
Associated Press, January 11, 2012
Review by M.L. Johnson
"The Underside of Joy" covers the transforming experiences of most of our lives — marriage, parenthood and death — with maturity, understanding and grace. Anyone who has known love, loss, regret and forgiveness can identify with Ella and her transformation, and with subplots about sibling rivalry, the local food movement and the persecution of Italian immigrants during World War II, the book offers a lot to think about. I suspect it will be a book club favorite" ... more
A Design So Vast by Lindsey Mead
Sere is unflinching in her ability to draw complicated, deeply human people. Everybody stumbles, she asserts, and the best we can do is turn and face our flaws...The Underside of Joy refuses to resolve into easy answers, into good and bad..The novel’s message echoes: we cannot escape where we came from, but those shadows provide immeasurable depth to the joy of our lives ... more
Kirkus
"A poignant debut about mothers, secrets and sacrifices...Halverson avoids sentimentality, aiming for higher ground in this lucid and graceful examination of the dangers and blessings of familial bonds."
People Style Watch
"[An] exquisite debut… moving and hopeful"
Publishers Weekly
"Halverson paints a lovely picture of smalltown life and intimate family drama…Nuanced characters and lack of cliché make for a winning debut."
Booklist
"Halverson’s debut novel marks her as a strong new voice in women’s fiction…this would make an excellent book-club choice."
Shelf Awareness
Review by Valerie Ryan
"Seré Prince Halverson's debut novel is a faultless exploration of sadness and shame, anger and forgiveness; a story well told about people we would like to know."
Marisa de los Santos, NYT bestselling author of Love Walked In and Falling Together
"The writing in The Underside of Joy is as purely beautiful as the story is emotionally complex. When Ella Beene is wrenched from a state of unexamined happiness into confusion and grief, she finds that her only hope of emerging whole is to face searing and long-buried truths. Ella embarks on a difficult journey, both morally and materially, one that requires her to risk losing everything she most loves. I cheered (sometimes through tears) her every step."
Caroline Leavitt, NYT bestselling author of Pictures of You and Girls In Trouble
"Searingly smart and exquisitely written, Halverson’s knockout debut limns family, marriage and a custody battle in a way that gets under your skin and leaves you changed. To say I loved this book would be an understatement."
Publisher's Marketplace, May 19, 2011
Review by Sarah Weinman
"The most genuine happiness cannot be so pure, so deep, or so blind," announces Ella Beene near the beginning of Sere Prince Halverson’s emotionally rich debut novel … . For Ella, thirty-five and "not a physical beauty – not ugly, but nothing near what I’d look like if I’d had a say in the matter" – this is a hard-won conclusion, arrived at after a painful childhood and first marriage. But she’s spent the past three years in a blissful state, married to grocery store owner Joe Capozzi, stepmother to his two young children Annie and Zach, and "the best thing that’s happened to the family", according to the Capozzi family and the entire small town of Elbow, in Northern California.
Then Joe dies in an accidental drowning, and Annie and Zach’s mother Paige – who abandoned the family just four months after Zach’s birth – reappears at the funeral wanting full custody of the children. During the ensuing battle, as well as the discovery of a multitude of secrets about Joe and his family, Ella realizes how long she’s let others define her and what she must do to protect herself and the children she’s thought of as her own.
In broad but tenderly-applied brushstrokes, Halverson paints a picture of two different women acting with the best of intentions and the worst of consequences, revealing the ramifications of post-partum depression (in Paige’s case) and being punished for speaking one’s mind and telling the truth (in Ella’s case.) Halverson also weaves complex subplots with deceptive ease, from the lingering aftermath of Italian-American internment camps during World War II to Joe’s older brother David making his own place at the family business table.
"We all break the surface into this life already howling the cries of our ancestors, bearing their DNA, their eye colors and their scars, their glory and their shame." So much time is spent seeking and wishing for happiness, understandably so. But The Underside of Joy demonstrates the simplistic nature of this pursuit, which too often has more to do with fear and shallow living than the truth. In Ella Beene, Halverson fashions a heroine one roots for in times of happiness and aches for at her lowest points, but the strength of this novel is in its empathy for all of its characters – and for two women who want what’s best for the children they both love with equal claim on motherhood.
Sarah Weinman is News Editor for Publishers Marketplace.
Dutton, 307 pp., $25.95, Release date: January 17, 2012.
