57 pages • 1 hour read
Emily HenryHappy Place
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Romance Trope of Pretending To Be in Love
The romance genre has many tropes, such as enemies to lovers, fake relationships, love triangles, opposites attract, and forbidden love. Tropes are used because they offer a comforting, predictable experience for readers, who often gravitate to these stories because they have a formulaic plotline and a happy ending. A take on the fake relationship trope, Happy Place puts the broken up Harriet and Wyn in the position of pretending to still be in love so as not to dampen the joyful mood of Sabrina and Parth’s surprise wedding. This setup pushes Harriet and Wyn into working through their conflicts with vulnerability, allowing them to grow individually with their dreams and goals, and bringing them closer together than before.
The trope of pretend love more typically features characters with no romantic history faking feelings for each other until the feelings turn real. In this case, Harriet and Wyn were together for many years; their fake relationship recapitulates and builds on their real one. Here, the fact that Harriet and Wyn were already a couple allows the fake love trope to deepen characterization and create conflict. This reworking of the formula is one of the ways romance novelists update the genre while still maintaining the key elements that attract readers—particularly, the happy ending.
Cultural Context: Vacationland Maine
The novel is set in a town in Coastal Maine, the site of the characters’ yearly friend group trip. This location is known as “Vacationland Maine”—reflecting a concerted effort that the state has made to brand itself as a tourist haven. The state’s license plates have included the slogan “Vacationland” for more than 80 years, promoting Maine’s pristine, rocky coast, wilderness, rivers, and seafood to thousands of visitors every summer.
In the novel, the group always visits Maine during the Lobster Festival—one of many real-life events celebrating “favorite things about Maine; its heritage, crops, music and lifestyle. [...] You can enjoy Maine’s lobster festival, potato blossom festival and wild blueberry festivals” (“7 Reasons Why Maine is Vacationland” Northeast Whitewater Blog, 24 April 2016). Incorporating these factual details allows Emily Henry to add specificity and authenticity to the novel: Harriet loves Maine’s blueberries, and the friends enjoy fried seafood, popovers, and Old Bay fries. One of the novel’s locations is a bookstore called Murder, She Read—a nod to the Maine-based detective TV show Murder, She Wrote; another setting is Acadia National Park. Sabrina even suggests the friends get matching tattoos that read “wicked pissah,” which is New England slang for “awesome.” The specificity of detail grounds the novel in recognizable real contexts.
Related Titles
By Emily Henry
