As her stultifying marriage is unravelling, and in the midst of mourning the loss of her creative self, Caro Tanner has a nightmare about Peter, an old love whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She takes this as a sign he still needs her. With her three children safely off to summer camp, Caro embarks on a pre-Facebook, pre-cell phone road trip to recapture who she once was and what she thinks … thinks she once had. Set in the rock ‘n roll ‘60s of Tucson, Arizona—when Caro and Peter were kooky, colorful, and inseparable drama students—and in the suburban ‘80s, when Caro’s creative spark has been quenched to serve the needs of her husband and children, So Happy Together explores the conundrum of love and physical attraction, creativity and family responsibilities, and what happens when they are out of sync. It is a story of missed opportunities, the alluring possibility of second chances, and what we leave behind, carry forward, and settle for when we choose. It sits in that complicated, confounding, beautiful place where love resides.
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I loved this book! It’s funny, insightful, and highly entertaining. I was born in the early 1960s, so I don’t have formative memories of the times, but Shepherd’s descriptions are fascinating and extremely visual. I loved the way she wove the past and present together through Caro’s journey of self-discovery—at times it felt like a film—and I’m a sucker for a road trip.
Our life choices are the sum of who we are and who we’ve become, and of course we are responsible for the decisions we make, but this book got me wondering and thinking about the ‘what ifs’, the crossroads, the past loves, and why we do the things we do. The past has a way of creeping up on you and sometimes you need to scroll back through the decades to find out who you really are and take back control.
When a book stays with you after you read the last page, you know it’s good!
What’s in a title? With this wonderful novel, so much. It starts you off looking forward to a journey as you hum along with the lyrics to bum-ba-bum bum-
“Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
To think about the girl you love and hold her tight
So happy together.”
Wondering where the music will take you, about the story that will unfold and the characters you meet, I was excited to travel with Caro as she searched back in time to figure out if what she remembers about her relationship with Peter was better than what she has. There is so much that unfolds—a story that is relatable as we all question our choices in life. But, in the surprising end, you realize that it is a journey that the protagonist must take to find what she is looking for. Deborah Shepherd is an excellent storyteller and I wholeheartedly recommend this book. I had to include the song in this review as I have been humming all along—I invite you to do so too!
So Happy Together starts out like a story you think you may have read…. but it’s not!
Deborah Shepherd has added a twist to the story of the midlife woman who looks back at her college years and her college love – her soul mate.
Shepherd takes the reader from Caro’s comfy home in Westport, Connecticut in the 1980s to Tuscan, Arizona in the 1960s with all that love, peace and joy has to offer. The journey goes back and forth between time revealing the main character’s need for closure.
The time travel is well balanced and the reader becomes as needy as the main character – wishing Caro will come to terms with herself and her relationships, past and present.
So Happy Together is a heartfelt story of friendship, love and acceptance – peppered with free love in the 60s.
A STRONG DEBUT! Shepherd’s new novel is a gem! I loved taking the journey with our protagonist Caro, a relatable, endearing character who the reader will root for! The author flawlessly braids the past with the present, as the story unfolds vividly with sensory detail and imagery. Beautifully written, well-crafted scenes, strong character development—A recipe for a GREAT read. You do not want to miss this one!
A rich trip back to the 60s from middle age
Middle aged women who are disappointed and restless in marriages and motherhood can take any number of steps to resolve their situation. In this engaging novel, the main character, Caro, decides to take a road trip across the US to visit her college love, to see if she can regain a part of herself that she lost along the way to her dull life as wife and mother. This plan is of course fraught with possibilities of passion, satisfaction, heartbreak, and/or an upturned life, so it kept me reading to find out which it would be, and the story unfolds in a very satisfying way. It starts with the road trip, and then, as Caro drives, the reason for the trip is filled in with seamless flash backs to her college days, her current married life, and her musings about how she got from there to here. As the trip goes on, we get more and more invested in her relationship with the college boyfriend, the husband, and her other friends, many of whom are gay. A major treat of this book is that we get to revisit college life in the 60s (which earned the book a historical fiction designation—Hey! That’s my life you are calling historical!). Caro’s college friendship circle in a drama department of an Arizona university is both an emblematic portrayal of young women and men in that era, and a rare glimpse at the beginning of open gay male life. A well-written, at once familiar and fresh glimpse of those times, it made for a rich and rewarding story right to the end.
Shepherd takes us on a literal ride into the not-so-distant past, remembering how naive we were before we understood there are things you just can’t change—even if you’re destined, even if you’re soul mates, even if you’re willing to risk everything …some calls are louder than love. A nostalgic look at the star-crossed dilemma of longing for someone who will never be available. The reader will ache at the forced (and quite salty) sass of the young narrator, desperate to show it doesn’t hurt. And, highly enjoy the ironic wit of the mature voice who knows better and goes for it all the same. A story for anyone who can relate to how we cling to a fantasy of the past to excuse not committing to the present.