Review: Happiness is a Four Letter Word –The Book
Some books you pick them up the first time and they alter how you will spent all your reading or free time until their last page. I took the book with me everywhere I went because I thorough enjoyed it and I always wanted to know what was going to happen next. I wanted to finish it fast so that I would know how it ends.
Lebo Mashile described reading this book as eavesdropping on a heart-to-heart conversation between stylish sistas sitting next to you at a restaurant, I do agree with her, for the days when I took the book with me on my solo tea dates. For me, the book felt like a close friend of mine I haven’t seen in a while trying to keep me up to date with the gossip about what happens behind closed doors at the suburbs that every township girl wishes to be upgraded to.
From the outside looking in with the eyes of a struggling black South African, these four friends have definitely dipped their fingers in the happiness jar. They are what every struggling black women longs to become. Successful careers, kids that speak fluent English and go to private schools, rich influential husbands and boyfriends who cook and know when to say the right things. That’s perfection right? The very definition of happiness?? Not according to the four soul sistas! Because in the midst of that, there is a compromised happiness from a cheating spouse, a junkie boyfriend and a child being born outside of what is meant to be a holy matrimony.
The book is about how the four soul sistas Zaza, Nandi, Pri and Tumi strive to find and keep their happiness. I truly believe that this is a beautifully penned story, that even at the end, I wanted the story to continue.
If anyone would ask me what the writer meant by ‘Happiness Is A Four Letter Word’, I would say that to find love - true love worth fighting for, worth forgiving for, worth understanding that there is indeed nothing perfect about it – It is to find happiness. I believe, just as much as this book beautifully narrates that Love in its sincere and honest way, is our ultimate source of happiness.
Now that I have read the book, and loved it – I am ready to watch the movie.
