Marlowe Granados

I can easily understand why some readers won't jive with this book, but I personally found it to be a deliciously perfect read to end the summer on. The writing is pretentiously lilting yet direct, the main characters are obnoxiously lovable and mean, and the whole story reads like a cleaned-up, dramatized diary. I adored it all. Granados has SUCH a keen hand at describing the thoughts and antics of women in their early 20s, and even the aspects that were foreign to me (like living in NYC and doing live portrait work) were so well described that I connected to them immediately. The diary thing really works here because I felt as if Isa was my own friend and she was telling me all these stories in person. "Happy Hour" felt like a mix of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Gossip Girl" with a dash of J.D. Salinger (if Salinger was a fashionably dressed woman living in 2013).

You know how sometimes people (coughmencough) brush off women because they think she's too dumb or too pretty or just too much of a woman to have an intelligent thought, but in reality the woman is like, this incredibly insightful and witty human who happens to have a fashion taste people are too boring to appreciate? That's what "Happy Hour" is: there are always going to be those who read this and brush it off for being silly/repetitive/insert-vague-critical-buzzword-here, but this book is a gem to those who will take the time to actually get to know it.… (altro)