Truth be told, I spend the vast majority of any year reading nonfiction. Whether it be a political memoir, a biography, or historical nonfiction (from the gunpowder empires to the Obama administration), all of it can hold my attention and interest for hours on end.
That said, having grown up with a love for Jane Austen’s wit, an exhaustive knowledge of Taylor Swift’s musical catalog, and a curiosity for how and why we communicate, there’s always some space on my “to be read” list for a romance novel.
Most recently, I turned to Julie Olivia’s 2024 book, If It Makes You Happy. You can think of its premise as a reverse “Luke and Lorelai” of Gilmore Girls fame. Rather than a grumpy diner owner and a golden retriever-esque single-mother innkeeper falling in love against the backdrop of a fictional Connecticut town in the 2000s, If It Makes You Happy offers a single dad who runs his bakery with a smile and an out-of-towner innkeeper who yearns for her job back in the city in a fictional Vermont town in 1997.
For fans of Christina Lauren’s Love and Other Words (2018) or Abby Jimenez’s Yours Truly (2023), this novel will be right up your alley. Olivia switches perspectives between her two main characters with every chapter. As a result, the reader ends up understanding the characters more intimately than the characters understand each other—and arguably themselves. Particularly endearing is the window we get into the humor of the male lead, Cliff—where it comes from and how he determines where and when to deploy it.
A quick aside about format: I am a devout audiobook lover. Audiobooks allow me to spend more of my time reading (which is all I ever really want) and also have the advantage of bringing material to life in a distinctly different manner than what the printed page can do alone. This is especially true for audio[i]books of dual-perspective novels with multiple narrators. For the audio version of If It Makes You Happy, narrators Blair Young, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Alex Raby, and Emily Eiden put on remarkable performances. They are each dynamic in their own right, offering narrations that mapped squarely onto the image I had created in my mind for the characters. If I were recommending an audiobook to a first-time listener, If It Makes You Happy would be high on the list.
All of that being said, Olivia writes with a palpable warmth. Her world building feels as nostalgic as it does effective. From the eccentric neighbors and spunky relationship that the female lead Michelle has with her dog, Rocket, to the ’90s cultural references—Walkmans, the Smashing Pumpkins, the notable lack of cellphones—the characters feel grounded. A less well-executed attempt might leave the book feeling kitschy. Instead, Olivia gives the reader a taste of a life many would draw up as their ideal—even if it is destined to sit out of reach.
If the book suffers from a particular weakness, it would be the epilogue and the bonus scene (found in some versions). While both offer humor and a look at what’s to come, neither one is narrated by a main character, forcing Olivia to write the first-person perspectives of two characters that don’t have that role at any other point in the book. Still, I am nitpicking, and no one should be turned off by the book’s extended ending.
At the end of the day, what makes the book work especially well for me is its pacing. With the passage of time marked via headings and the celebration of holidays, the book makes it clear that this is not a whirlwind or love-at-first-sight romance. Instead, Olivia carefully considers what intertwines two people. Feelings? Sure, but also a vision for a life of shared ambitions that factors in things like what to do with the dog from a previous marriage, how to best take kids into account, and when to let logistics take a back seat to feelings. To me, this kind of romance novel—one that explores what the process of falling in love helps us to understand about our partners and ourselves—is where the genre houses some of its best work.