I fear it is not comfortable or pleasant to live so thoroughly inside a person's head. This book reads like a minimally edited long form diary entry, taking place over the course of a single night. I'm usually a fan of fail girl protagonists but found the unnamed narrator's brutal lack of self-awareness grating. I can celebrate this book for its bold narrative choices and scathing critique of the upper class but less so for its abstract structure and tedious run-on sentences .

This will be a very divisive novel for sure but I had a blast with this one. I love lit-fic and this checked off everything that I love about this genre.

Our narrator has returned to town for her former best friend's funeral and the novel takes place over the course of a dinner party that she's attending hosted by Eugene and Nicole. She begins to reflect on every single person in the room and comes to the realization that, yeah, she really does hate everyone here.

This was everything that I look for in a "weird girl lit-fic" book. I thought that the writing and dialogue was clever and sharp. Our narrator is a delight to read. Her inner dialogue is hilarious and brutal. The plot itself is very intense and the author does an amazing job with ramping up the awkwardness and the tension engulfing the room--ultimately cumulating in a well-executed final scene.

I would highly recommend this one. It was an absolute delight to read and I definitely see myself re-reading it in the future.

unfortunately didn't enjoy this one and eventually DNF'd around the 40% mark. didn't connect with the characters and found them pretentious, also wasn't crazy about the writing style, even though I typically like stream of consciousness type stuff. maybe it was that I just wasn't connecting to the story at all. unfortunately a miss for me.

This was well written and although the main character felt a little underdeveloped, The strong plot upheld the book as a whole.

Unfortunately, this story just didn’t work for me. It came across as very pretentious, and there were no likable characters. It was a quick read, but I definitely can’t recommend it.

Such a huge disappointment. Happiness and Love was on my highly anticipated reads of this year. The synopsis sounded so interesting and intense. Unfortunately, I had an impossible time getting into the prose. The writing style was so dense and disjointed. The long, rambling paragraphs turned me off, and the lack of quotation marks really aggravated me. This whole novel felt like a manifesto and therapy session. When the exciting moments did happen, it didn’t rock my world. I wanted to love this book so much, but it was an utter failure and it hurts to say that. This book had potential to be something great and profound but ultimately left me feeling frustrated.

I imagine many people won’t enjoy this novel - none of the characters, including the protagonist, are likeable. The prose is frenetic, venomous, and excoriating.

That being said, it’s worth the read if you love literature and art, and if you think the rich should be taxed much more. Happiness and Love is well written, and successfully executed. The ruminating form captures the malcontent of our current age - it’s an accessible critique of the art world, consumerism, capitalism, and quasi-intellectualism.

Read this is you’ve ever found yourself sitting in the corner of a party, drinking too much wine and judging everyone around you (including yourself).

I couldn’t finish this one. It was rather like the literary equivalent of acid indigestion. So much bile. I know, that was the point in this takedown of New York pretentiousness but the snarkyness was just overwhelming. Some may enjoy its spite, and there’s undeniable wit and detail on display, but the tone is unrelenting. No thanks.

2.5⭐️
I was not a fan of the lack of chapters and paragraphs on this since it made it hard to find a good stopping point.

This was just a continuous rant and maybe would’ve worked better as an essay.

Inspired by Woodcutter by Thomas Bernhard, Happiness and Love is about a women who is roped into a dinner party with her former friends from the NYC art scene she abandoned five years before, blissfully unaware she is doing the same things she’s criticizing the pretentious dinner party guests for. While the entirety of this book takes place at the dinner party, this book is more in the mind of our main character as she reflects on her, and her former friends’ bad behaviors in the past, and grief. The writing is a bit repetitive, but in a way that felt purposeful (but saying Bowery 10 times in the first two pages was a bit much). I really enjoyed this, and can see it really being a hit for people who like lit fic about insufferable people and main characters who lack self awareness.

It's kinda hard for me to read this book because the paragraphs are so long. Oh no, it's even worse, everything has no breaks and just mashed into one big block. No paragraphs at all, let alone separate chapters. That's all. Just wanted to say that.

Stream of consciousness was hard for me to get in to, but interesting mode of engaging with this population

Wonderfully written clever entertaining.A dinner party narrated through the eyes of a female guest with a sharp tongue,Really enjoyed the writing the story.# NetGalley # scribner

This collection of poems explores themes of longing, vulnerability, and the pursuit of joy through raw and intimate language. Dubno’s voice is thoughtful and reflective, often capturing the fragile moments where happiness and love intersect with pain and uncertainty.

I appreciated the emotional honesty in many pieces, especially the way the poems hold space for both tenderness and complexity without feeling forced. There’s a quiet sincerity that runs through the work, which made some poems resonate deeply.

That said, the collection sometimes felt uneven. A few poems seemed less polished or a bit repetitive in theme, which pulled me out of the emotional momentum at times. I also wanted a bit more variety in tone or imagery to break up the contemplative mood.

Overall, Happiness and Love is a heartfelt collection that will appeal to readers who appreciate honest, intimate poetry focused on the nuances of human emotion. While it’s not without its flaws, the moments of genuine feeling made it worth reading.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno
A quiet, introspective exploration of modern life, desire, and emotional connection. Dubno’s writing is sharp and observant, offering a raw, honest take on what it means to pursue fulfillment in today’s world. A thoughtful read for literary fiction fans.

I absolutely loved this book. following her train of thought and side tangents while at the wake felt so real and true to how someone would actually think in this situation. i also loved that the story ended with the actress roasting eugine and nicole and calling them on thier bullshit and that all the narrators thoughts were finally said even if not by her. I also think the ending of her still saying that she would love to hang out again soon was so real in that no matter how hard we try to set boundaries with ourselves and others it's SO HARD to actually do.

Stylistically, I wish there were more paragraph breaks to make the text easier to read and follow but I also understand that having those breaks could disrupt the feeling of the whole book being a contstant train of thought.

This novel is a wickedly smart, darkly funny descent into the art world’s most toxic chambers—and it’s absolutely mesmerizing. Told with scalpel-sharp wit and an eye for the absurd, the story follows a disillusioned narrator as she returns to the scene of her former life: New York’s Lower East Side, where art and ambition bleed into vanity, and authenticity is just another aesthetic.

The setup is deceptively simple: a dinner party after a friend’s funeral. But what unfolds is a brilliant, slow-burning character study and social critique that unravels precisely. The narrator—cynical, observant, and unrelentingly honest—guides us through a room full of beautifully dressed, emotionally bankrupt creatives. From her vantage point on the white sofa, she dismantles every guest with scathing clarity, exposing the artifice of their interactions and the rot beneath their curated personas.

What makes this novel sing is its voice: dry, devastating, and alive with contempt that’s as earned as it is enjoyable. And while it’s easy to laugh at the grotesque gallery of personalities on display, the absolute brilliance lies in the narrator’s own complicity—her self-awareness that she is not above the emptiness she’s critiquing.

When the long-awaited guest arrives, and chaos inevitably follows, the novel has already laid bare its themes: the performative nature of grief, the commodification of identity, and the way nostalgia can both haunt and seduce. This is not just a satire of the art world—it’s a meditation on what happens when we build lives around performance and forget to ask what’s real.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno is a vivid critique of pretension, mordernism, and artists.
It follows a woman as she is attending a dinner party in name of her former best friend, Rebecca, that died a few weeks earlier. It’s hosted by a couple that she has come to hate— Eugene and Nicole. And she reflects on her relationship with nearly every person in the room, she critiques their flaws and selfish acts that she has come to learn about. She hates everyone in the room, that’s obvious. She doesn’t hide in her narrative that absolute distaste for these people, which she no longer wants to be associated with. She’s constantly reflecting on her relationship with the guests at the “party”, especially Eugene with his egocentric wife. Although the dinner party is hosted in Rebecca’s name, they are all waiting on a new, up-and-coming actress to arrive. This literary device keeps the reader engaged with the plot (which, per se, is barely noticeable) throughout the whole book, which leads to a spectacularly done argument between two characters.

With prose that glides off the page, and humor that is never over-the-top, Dubno crafts a room full of awkwardness and complete awareness on the part of the narrator. She despises all of them, giving us, the reader, a spectacular look into all of these people’s of their lives. She makes fun of them, showing us every negative attribute associated with these pretentious artists, masterfully pairing sober tones with satirical ones.

I would really recommend this for readers of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or any book that focuses on the despair of humanity through the lense of a woman who despises humans.

This is basically 200 pages of main character talking mad trash on some seriously pretentious tricks. Then another baddie comes in with fire and a mic drop.

The no chapter, no paragraph, no break format took getting used to...can't say it grew on me. It felt a bit meandering and I struggled with the writing style.

But overall? Who doesn't love to see an asshole getting taken down a couple notches? This was jolly good fun!

A disillusioned writer who's been roped into a performative dinner the very elitist,"in" group of artists, writers, wannabees, and at the center of it, and extremely wealthy benefactor couple. It's a short read but it reads like stream of consciousness, in the eloquent and scathing tone that we all wish we could adopt when we're roasting that old friend group that we think we've grown out of for the better.

There were so many delicious, hilarious rants - against the sycophantic and symbiotic relationship between the power couple and the artists they associate with.

hat even if you're not necessarily in with this kind of a group, you can relate to on some level because of the dynamic of how we all interoperate and because of that but also seems like the writer is partially roasting you. Or all of us.