A hard hitting and thought provoking read. Deals with difficult topics related to race, privilege, and power imbalance. Written in alternating time lines, slow pacing to build the overall emotional impact of the story. Overall well written

Like Happiness was an interesting read. I found it to be a fairly accurate depiction of the manipulation so many young women unfortunately experience from older men. Getting to see Tatum realize the mistreatment she endured at a young age, a time when she wasn't fully aware of how poorly Matteo was treating her, was interesting. As a reader, I was able to witness her present self take back the power her younger self had unconsciously given up.

My only qualm was this one was a bit slow to read for me, perhaps a matter of the pacing between present and past, but otherwise I was very impressed with this debut.

Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a poignant and engaging narrative. I loved the way the timeline dipped in and out at times, taking us backwards for context and pulling us forward to the present as the narrative unfolds. There were times where it moved a bit slowly, but the overall length was not so great that it disturbed my pace as a whole. Overall, it was right in line with the type of book I like to read and I would certainly recommend it to those in my circle.

I love books about books, so this one was hard to resist.

“Toxic relationships are like ticking bombs. Once I pulled the pin and acknowledged your disregard, your disingenuousness, your betrayal, we could never rewind and begin again.”

This unique coming-of-age story covers themes of identity, self-actualization, isolation, toxic relationships, and power dynamics, which often go hand in hand. It follows Tatum’s life over ten years, from her college years to her early thirties, and her relationship with older renowned writer, M. Domínguez, whom she idolizes (or more precisely – whose writing she’s obsessed with). I loved that it was written in the form of a letter. It felt very personal, and it made it easy to understand Tatum’s perspective and emotions. Even though I couldn’t connect to her character personality-wise, some of her experiences felt relatable.

Overall, this was a solid debut! The writing style was beautiful, and the story was engaging. The outcome of their relationship was predictable, but there was also a twist I didn’t see coming.

Thank you, NetGalley, the publisher Celadon Books, and author Ursula Villarreal-Moura for the ARC copy! My review is based on an uncorrected text. I received a free copy of this book, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The legal and ethical ramifications of a romantic relationship between a teacher and student are fairly well understood, but there may exist a grey area when that relationship occurs between a celebrity and a fan. Tatum Vega is a young woman who has devoted the entire third decade of her life to limerence with renowned author M. Dominguez. Feeling adrift as a rare Latina woman amid the White-centered worlds of art and literature in her Massachusetts college, M.'s (Mateo's) work is a lifeline. Ten years after her first email to the author, a reporter contacts Tatum after another woman accuses Mateo of sexual assault. Like Happiness is a reflection of those years, told from the perspective of a woman who is coming to terms with the manipulative nature of the man she put above everyone and everything else.

Difficult to put down, Like Happiness was able to weave together an interesting narrative with a descriptive experience that many Hispanic and other minority groups face. The writing was beautiful, and Tatum was an empathetic character despite being so unmoored. I would have liked to see more evolution of how Tatum is able to maintain a healthy relationship with Vera after being manipulated by Mateo for so long. I came away knowing more about Tatum's cats than her current partner, but maybe its because Mateo will always be number one and Vera is just another detour. I'm glad this is left open to interpretation, as I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come.

Note: I received a free ebook copy of Like Happiness from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Like Happiness follows Tatum Vega, a A mesmerizing, gripping and powerful debutyoung woman from Texas, one of the only Latina students at a predominantly white Massachusetts college. As a result of her isolation, Tatum contacts the author of her favorite book. When the author, M., emails her back, she is excited, and they bond over their Latinx identity and love of literature.
Tatum recounts her story in dual timelines - one focuses on her life in NYC and her 10-year relationship with M., and one describes her present life in Chile, living with her partner Vera and working at a museum.
Like Happiness explores a toxic relationship in which a man wields his fame, power and money to manipulate and control a woman. Tatum puts her professional and personal life on hold for M., until a revelation occurs which allows her to extricate herself from the abuse. As a reader much older than Tatum, it was emotionally difficult to read, at times, as the red flags, grooming and trauma were transparent to me but not obvious to young Tatum. Tatum's character growth is skillfully portrayed as she gains strength, confidence, embraces her sexual identity and comes to recognize M. for what he is.
This well written, mesmerizing, powerful and gripping debut will resonate with many.
Thank you to Celadon Books for the gifted ARC.

I genuinely enjoyed this book. the story was engaging, and the plot was interesting the entire time throughout the whole story i would highly recommend this book to everyone interested.

I love me a story like this! It kept me captivated from the first chapter. I just think a wide variety/range of people will really enjoy this! I recommend.

Like a ghost of relationship past, LIKE HAPPINESS, draws on a complicated relationship between a young woman and the writer she idolizes. Time allows her to look at what they had anew and gives her new perspective on what may have been something unhealthy for her all along.

📖 This is a tough review to write. While there was so much about this book that I appreciated— it also just wasn’t super entertaining.

📖 This started off super strong for me and I thought I was going to devour it. But it started dragging and never really picked up. I even considered DNF’ing at one point, and honestly, I probably should have.

📖 THAT SAID- I did value the themes about minorities, grooming, and the grey area that can surround inappropriate relationships. A partnership can SEEM innocent when we are in it, only to look back as an older, wiser, individual— and begins to see all the things wrong with it.

📖 I’ve seen rave reviews for this, I’ve seen people who didn’t care for it. So the best advice for this one is to give it a try for yourself! But if you’re considering not finishing— my advice would be to put it down and move on.

📖 Have you read this one? What were your thoughts? Thanks to @celadonbooks and @netgalley for the early look at this in exchange for an honest review. This book is out now if you’re curious!

I was wowed by this debut! Like Happiness was so easy to read. I was hooked into the story from the beginning. The format of the storytelling was unique, both with the bouncing timelines and the letters to M. I was impressed by how clear the author's voice was. I loved how Spanish was woven throughout the story. And of course, I loved how it was a book about books! What a treat. Excited to see what Villarreal-Moura comes up with next!

I thought there was a lot of promise with the author's writing capability and clarity. In the end, I wasn't feeling compelled by the story, characters, or ending to get a 'so what' from it. The character accused of sexual assault didn't seem to make sense. He was definitely focused on himself and not genuine, but I never saw a hint of violence. There were a lot of interesting points and I know you can become infatuated more with the idea of someone, or their talent, rather than it being a real connected relationship.

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book.

I feel like I read a rough draft of someone’s book. Tatum was so whiny every time she walked into a room that had “too many” white people. And it was a little creepy that M wanted to call this young girl fan. Not a big fan of this one.

Like Happiness is the most recent novel from Ursula Villarrea-Moura. A gripping tale of obsession, grooming, toxic relationships, and the invisibility of of Latinas/Latinos in literature and education. *Please note that I used the terms the author used in the book. I believe LatinX wasn't used due to the timeframe of the story when the new term hadn't started being used yet.*

Tatum Vega has always loved reading and art, so when she reads M. Dominguez's novel Happiness, it's the first time that she's seen herself and her culture shown in a book. She becomes almost obsessed with the book, re-reading it over and over. When she begins corresponding with M, she had no idea how that would change the direction of her life. Told in a dual-timeline of the 10 years they knew each other and her current life in Chile in 2015, most of it was narrated in a casual way, where she's directly speaking to Mateo.

When Tatum and M start spending time together, she just keeps falling more in love with him. He makes her feel special in the beginning, frequently staying in contact, seeing her regularly, having conversations about race, writing, and travel. As his career takes off, he's traveling a lot so he's in and out of her life, but she stays loyal to him, even when she finds out he's seeing other women. Mateo becomes the center of her world, and she knows that at some point he'll stop keeping her at arms length and she'll become the center of his. Then the novel he's been working on for 10 years finally comes out, and there's a falling out between them.

So when Jamal calls Tatum for an interview about M because a woman named Maria Luz has filed allegations against Mateo (although we never get the full details of what allegedly happened to her - which is probably one of the things I didn't like - I wanted to hear more of her story), for the first time in years Tatum reflects on her life with him.

As a white female in her mid-40s, I had never realized how much we had disregarded anyone in literature who wasn't white. I was an English minor in college, and just like Tatum's classes, we didn't discuss the racial disparity in the novels we read, so this book opened my eyes to that.

All in all, this was a great novel! It was a fast read, and went right into the story with minimal build-up and foundation, which is always a good thing. I was slightly disappointed with the ending, but the rest of the story was interesting and well paced. I felt like it just kind of stopped with no solid resolution.

Thank you to @NetGalley and @CeladonBooks for a digital copy for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.

This book has a dual timeline both told from Tatum Vega's POV. It goes back and forth between current and about 10 years ago. The past deals with her friendship with a famous male author that begins while she is in college. The current time line follows her processing that friendship when she finds out he has been accused of SA.

This book covers toxic relationships and power imbalance in relationships and how that affects an individuals sense of self. I appreciated the dual timeline and how Tatum processes her thoughts and feelings through an interview with a journalist and writing to her author friend. Tatum navigates through her young adult life as the only POC in many spaces and has to deal with casual racism and how the white POV is seen as the correct point of view in many academic and literary spaces.

The book was both thoughtful and emotional and I would recommended it to women looking to be seen and heard, and especially to white women to learn more empathy and what intersectional feminism entails.

4.5 rounded up

I loved this coming-of-age toxic relationship book. I flew through it and it was exactly what I needed after a slump of mediocre books. This book follows Tatum from a college student to a thirty-year-old woman and her relationship with a prestigious author throughout these years.

I found the direct address usage of “you” in the flashback chapters intriguing and it kept me involved in the novel. I also really liked the ending even though it infuriated me! I was totally feeling for Tatum throughout this whole story.

This book left me with lots to think about including class, identity, gender, and power dynamics. This book is available now and I will definitely be recommending it. I can’t wait to read what this author comes out with next.

This book was a really unique book. I enjoyed this story but it also did feel heavy as the main character re-examines her experiences she had with a writer she contacted when she was first in college. The commentary this novel makes on how powerful men can use women for their own means is a stark one, but I did think an important one to make. The male main character is this book is a perfect example of a narcissist and uses the women around himself, and the female main character Tatum examines how this affected her over many years in the format of a letter written to him after time apart. I don’t know what I was expecting with this one, but it was definitely an interesting read and left off on a note that seemed to bring some resolution

It’s 2015 and Tatum Vega is peacefully enjoying the life she built in Chile with her partner Vera. One day, she is contacted by a US reporter for an interview regarding her relationship with M. Domínguez, a famous author who has been accused of sexual assault. This compels her to recount and re-examine the relationship she once had with the older and established author.

Tatum and M connect after Tatum falls in love with his book and writes him a fan letter. At the time, Tatum was an undergraduate student in Massachusetts and M was a professor in New York. As Tatum continues to recount her 10 year history with M, it is clear that the one-sided relationship caused Tatum to struggle to freely explore her identity and advance in life.

Like Happiness is a powerful novel that explores topics such as cultural identity, sexual orientation, self-discovery, grooming, power dynamics, and power imbalances. Although the storyline dragged on for a bit, the writing was beautiful. The author did a superb job portraying the ways M subtly manipulates Tatum and the long-lasting impact he had on her. I especially enjoyed the second-person writing because it made Tatum’s experience feel more personal. My heart hurts for Tatum.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars, rounded up

Like Happiness is Tatum's reflection on her young adulthood and relationships after an author she was enamored with is accused of sexual misconduct.

I found the direct address to 'you' (the author) in the flashback chapters an interesting and intimate approach, which was a nice contrast to the present day chapters.

I also appreciated how authentic their "relationship" felt--present in the story or not, Tatum's young adulthood was right in the midst of the manic pixie dreamgirl movie era, where women were treated like ideas rather than people, and sacrificing yourself for a brilliant man was somehow a noble goal.

Tatum knows there's something wrong with the relationship--his lack of reciprocity, him leveraging his depression, the love bombing/making her feel unique, refusing to define the murky edges of what they are saying that he's doing it to "protect" her--but she doesn't have enough experience to pinpoint what exactly is wrong.

In the end, the author betrays her, but it's not just her. It's many other women just like Tatum, at the same time as Tatum. What's particularly powerful is that while Tatum does not consider herself to necessarily have been victimized, she believes the other accuser(s) despite it not having been her experience. These men are never as brilliant as they seem, nor are they that clever.

I am excited to see what Ursula Villarreal-Moura writes next.

--I received a copy from Netgalley/the publisher, but my opinions are my own--

Thanks to Netgalley and the Celadon Books for the gifted e-arc. Its one of my anticipated books since I heard that it was similar to My Dark Vanessa. I feel like that is great book to compare it to. It's a coming of age story about Tatum and her toxic relationship with Mr. Dominguez who is a writer that she highly idolizes.

The story is a bit of a slow burn and it jumps from her life now in Chile and to her past when she met Dominguez. There were some parts that will get you angry at how she was groomed and how disgusting Dominguez behavior is towards Tatum. Its a pretty tough read but I feel that its sometimes a necessary read. It really showed how easily it is to fall into a toxic relationship and be taken full advantage of.

Check trigger warnings if you need them.