Cranston Public Library

"Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own...

What does it take to be happy? How happy is happy enough? And what does “happy” mean, anyway? So asks Sally Farber–wife, mother, daughter, friend, working woman, and lover–in this wise and funny novel about a woman’s search for happiness in some of the right, and a few of the wrong, places.
Summer in the city looms long for Sally Farber when she sends her two daughters off to camp for the first time. Suddenly freed...

"Boasting about her extravagant lifestyle on social media, but actually broke and squatting in Colorado, Bettie Hughes contemplates Christmas with her family and accidentally conjures up Hall, the Holiday Spirit, who can make all her wishes come true."--

"It's been seven years since Chelsea Martin embarked on her yearlong post-college European adventure. Since then, she's lost her mother to cancer and watched her sister marry twice, while Chelsea's thrown herself into work, becoming one of the most talented fundraisers for the American Cancer Coalition, and with the exception of one annoyingly competent coworker, Jason Knightley, her status as most successful moneymaker is unquestioned. When her introverted...

It's 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To make up for a past crime, he needs to get the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. There Adam joins other troubled people trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet emigre ; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand...

"A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters an ex-boyfriend from her...

"An unexpected friendship saves a young man's life in this moving, utterly charming debut about chosen family, the winding road to happiness, and the grace of second chances. Could I one day inspire happiness in others, the same way he seemed to do in me? It's 2005 and Harley has dropped out of college to move home, back to rural England where he works a dead-end job at a movie theater. Estranged from his father and finding every attempt at happiness...

Callie Dixon sets her goals and reaches them-so how did this executive chef end up in a small ice cream shop on Cape Cod, sharing a room with her cousin and refusing to set foot in the kitchen? It will take the charm of a young boy, and his quiet, steady father, to help her find the answers-and maybe the secret to happiness. Callie Dixon sets her goals and reaches them- so how did this executive chef end up in a small ice cream shop on Cape Cod,...

Sophie Chesterton is a girl about town - she knows all the right people, goes to all the right parties, and wears all the right clothes. But deep down she suspects that her best friends are actually rather nasty, and that her lifestyle doesn't really amount to much. Her father wants her to make her own way in the world, to make him proud. But after one shocking evening her life is changed for ever. Scraping a living as an assistant to a 'glamour'...

"An unhappy girl who engages in self-harm, a woman ostracized by society, and an old woman looking to live out her twilight years in peace--what could three such different people have in common? That's what grade schooler Koyanagi Nanoka is trying to find out. Assigned by her teacher to define what "happiness" means to her, Nanoka sets out to get to know these three strangers--and through them, perhaps, to know herself too."--