Perfect Happiness
Perfect Happiness by You-Jeong Jeong is dark, tense, sad - and I could not stop reading it. Twelve hours later, and I still have a knot in my stomach thinking about Yuma Shin.
It’s not as lyrical, but Perfect Happiness could have been called, “It’s Yuma’s World, and We’re All Living In It”.
From the time she was a child, Yuma has manipulated people - through tears, tantrums, and torture - to get what she wants. Or, more specifically, to get rid of the things she doesn’t want. Her philosophy is that she will be perfectly happy when she has eliminated everything - and everyone - that contributes to her unhappiness.
There’s a line in the book about the photos that Yuma takes and how they are all selfies, even when she’s not the only one in them. In the photos as in her life, she is in the center of the frame, and everyone else is in the periphery.
We are told Yuma’s story through the eyes of those peripheral to her - her sister Jane, her second husband Eun-Ho, and her young daughter, sweet baby angel Jiyoo.
It is through them that we learn about her life from childhood through college to the novel’s present day, and because we see through these three sets of eyes, we can put together patterns of behavior that they can’t (or don’t want to) see, and that increases the tension for us as we start to question- what has she done before on her quest for happiness- and what else is she willing to do - in particular to the characters that we’ve gotten close to as we watch from their eyes?
People are allowed to stay in Yuma’s world only as long as it suits her - for Eun-Ho, that means agreeing to her every demand - when he doesn’t, she leaves for days on end to he doesn’t know where (we know it’s a house her grandmother left her with some marshland). For sweet baby angel Jiyoo, complete obedience, deference, and absolutely no attention or affection to or from anyone else. And Jane - in her mind, Yuma has no sister, and there is no Jane. For Jane’s part, she hasn’t seen Yuma in years, finding a reason to be gone when Yuma visits their mother with whom Jane lives.
As Yuma practices extreme Konmari in her desire to find Perfect Happiness, those around her start to suspect how truly dangerous she is, but will they become able to stop her?
You-Jeong Jeong (as translated by Sean Lin Halbert) tells an incredibly thrilling story with a perfect ending - giving me another author to add my backlist TBR.
Thank you to NetGalley and Creature Publishing for the advance copy for my honest review. Pub. date: 9/30/25
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