Summary of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Below is a summary of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, a review, a character guide, and an explanation of the ending. Happiness Falls is shocking twists and thought-provoking questions. This book explores love, language, disabilities, and the lengths a family will go to understand one another. It’s one I think about frequently.

As soon as I started this book, I knew it was going to be a powerful and poignant one. I wanted to make sure that I did not miss any details so I took notes on the plot and themes. I wanted to be able to provide you with a thorough summary and review.

If you are thinking about picking this book for your next book club, you can check out my post Happiness Falls Book Club Questions, to help you out.

**Join us on November 24th when we talk to Angie Kim about Happiness Falls in the Beyond the Bookends Book Club (Click here for details)**

Summary of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Part 1: Everyone’s Fine

On the morning of June 23, 2020, Eugene and his dad went to the park like they do most mornings. At 11:38 AM, Eugene ran out of the woods by himself. He ran across traffic, causing an accident, and did not stop until he was home. Adam is not with him.

Mia is shocked that Eugene was running and cheered him on. She did not realize her dad was not there. After years of physical therapy to practice motor skills, this was a big accomplishment for Eugene. Eugene had a smile on his face and ran straight towards Mia, but rather than hugging her, he shoved her out of the way.

Mia is so confused at the juxtaposition of Eugene’s behavior and the expression on his face. She mentioned that something similar happened at Christmas. Mia notes that she chose to lay on the ground after being knocked over rather than checking on Eugene. She wonders if she had called the police, if things might have been different. Mia is blaming herself.

As she lies on the ground, she hears footsteps and thinks it’s her father coming home. She had changed her major from philosophy and music to Computer Music. She didn’t tell her parents right away and thinks that her father is upset with her, which is why he left her on the ground without talking to her.

Four hours later, when Mom and John come home, they ask where Adam is and why Eugene is still wearing dirty clothes. Adam did not respond to text messages all day, which is unlike him. Mia assumes that maybe Adam went looking for his phone because she is sure that he had come home.

We find out that the family lived in Seoul, Korea, from the time the twins were 5 until they were 13.

At 4:04 PM, Mom and John start looking for Adam and Mia stays home with Eugene. She notices blood under his nails and on his clothes just as the Police ring the doorbell. She quickly puts his clothes in the washing machine and tells him to get in the shower before answering the door.

The police have come to investigate the accident that Eugene caused by running across the street, and they are hinting that child welfare may get involved. Hannah and John come home and explain that they need help because Adam is missing. They are just assigned a detective to help them.

Initially, Mia feels a kinship with the detective, but later she regrets that choice. Detective Morgan Janus assures the family that a K-9 search is currently underway while she asks them questions. The detective assumes that Adam left. Hannah, John, and Mia are very upset by this.

The police are also considering that he died via suicide, and she questions why the family did not call the police sooner.

Mia wonders if Eugene can read.

When the detective asks if anything unusual happened, Mia looks back at breakfast and wonders if there is something going on. The detective also asks about life insurance. Mia finds a hard drive with a manila folder and passwords enclosed. There is a column of folders on the hard drive with the heading “HQ experiments”.

On the morning after Adam goes missing, Mia wakes up to Eugene screaming. She recalls the only other time he made that sound. Eugene did not talk or make a sound until he was three. He saw Harmonee die and was screaming over her dead body. Mia again notes that he was smiling while screaming.

The police are coming to interview Eugene, even though he is nonverbal. When they are starting their toothbrushing ritual (something that started a long time ago for them to brush their teeeth together), Mia sends a text to her dad’s phone that says 1,2,3 brush. A text bubble appears and somebody writes, “Who is this?”. May respond with “the most average and not at all special person you’ve encountered”. A new text appears, “Mia?”.

Mia runs to tell John and feels a moment of elation as the location on his phone finally moves. Mia and John run out of the house to find their dad. They bump into Susan, a mother of another kid in Eugene’s socialization group. She tells them that she is sorry about the horrible news. They know she cannot be talking about Adam being missing. When they ask her to explain, she diverts their attention.

John and Mia realize the detective sent the text. She found his phone. It was found in his backpack, which was on a rock 1/2 mile down the river.

Part 2: Happiness Quotient

Mia thinks that Eugene actually knows more than people think he does when he is looking at pictures. He shuts down when Mia asks him to point.

Mia wonders what her dad was looking into. There were pages from a notebook in the backpack that had notes on happiness. Mia thinks this has something to do with Happiness Quotient.

The detective also finds that Adam had transferred $20,000 to an account that is not their joint account. She also found a voicemail from a woman named Anjeli Rapari on Adam’s phone that said something about coming clean. There was also an ATM withdrawal from his bank card.

CPS comes to the door. The device tries to make Eugene interview without his mom. She refuses. The CPS person is a Speech Language Pathologist with some AAC devices (Augmentative and Alternative Communication).

Mia tells about an incident with a therapist they called TFT. She was working on physically supportive writing that is supposed to fade prompts and allow someone who is nonverbal to spell out words. There is a risk for the therapist, moving the arm of the child, and the letter choices not being independent.

Initially, Mom was so excited, but when TFT did it in front of the family, they found out she was a fraud. Adam has planned a whole scenario to call her out. Hannah and Adam almost got a divorce. They decide that Adam will stay at home and Hannah will go back to work. Mia notes that her dad agreed to “sacrifice for his family”, but that mom had stayed home for 16 years and she never called it a sacrifice.

In the present, the speech therapist shows Eugene the letter board. He gets upset and stabs a pen toward the paper, which is also in front of his mother’s face. The police try and stop him, and the detective gets hurt in the process. Detective Janus arrests Eugene.

John gets a text from his friend Kenny with a picture of his dad looking beat up. The picture is a still from a video on a mommy blog.

At the police station, Mia goes to find her dad’s notebook from evidence. From the notebook in Adam’s backpack, Mia finds Studies on happiness and notes about a gene therapy study. She recalls days in their childhood when the twins would have one-on-one time with their dad. She realizes that he was doing social experiments on them to see how it would change their perception of events. The journal has experiment #24 from June 23rd. Mia realizes that her dad was experimenting on Eugene.

Part III: The New Low Baseline

Mia recalls when Eugene was seven. He started screaming every night. He destroyed the twins’ 13th birthday cake. Mia was so furious. She fought with Eugene and sliced her hand on a glass plate when it broke. Eugene ended up having a bowel obstruction and needed emergency surgery.

It becomes clear that Detective Janus had the video from the mommy blog the whole time and never said anything about it. She arrested Eugene in the hope of obtaining a murder charge. The video shows Eugene screaming, flailing, and hurting his father. In a preliminary hearing, they decided to send him to secure placement for assaulting a police officer.

Their lawyer, Shannon, is a friend from Henry House. She tries to make the argument that Eugene is intellectually disabled and legally incapacitated because of his autism diagnosis.

He is sent to the facility anyway, but eventually is sent home on house arrest because of a COVID-19 outbreak in the facility. It is on lockdown. The twins come clean about the cancer diagnosis to their mom.

They all sit down with Shannon to discuss options. Shannon creates a chart listing all the possible options for Adam’s whereabouts. She said she needs to prove that any option other than Eugene hurting Adam is the most plausible.

The family discovers that Adam had a $3 million life insurance policy that would pay nothing if Adam dies by suicide, but would pay double for an accidental death. To defend Eugene, they need to prove that it was an accidental death and Eugene was not involved.

Part IV: The Myth of the Happy Nonverbal Bah-Bo

The family needs to make an appointment with a communication therapist before the hearing. They drive to numerous facilities, all of which are shut down. They found a residential neighborhood with a therapist listed. When they get to the house, Eugene runs to the back door and opens it with a hidden key. He immediately starts playing with the toys in the room.

On the wall is a picture with “We Love You Anjeli” written on it. Mia thinks this proves her father was having an affair.

John finds a box with speech therapy materials. He realizes Anjeli is a speech-language pathologist who specializes in text-based communication for people who cannot talk. Eugene and Adam had been seeing her three times a week for eight months.

Her website is “Unlock Your Voice” with a patient portal. All the sessions with Eugene are recorded, and they can log in with the password from the manila folder Mia found in Adam’s office. They find a video from 12 days ago.

Eugene is listening to a lecture on science and poking holes in the paper to answer the questions. John explains what scaffolding is. It is a means of providing support and gradually decreasing the amount of support as the student gains mastery. In the video, Eugene makes a joke about Mia.

Mia thinks about the association between fluency and a language and intelligence. She refers to the fact that when they were in Korea, people thought she was stupid for not speaking the language because she looked Korean. Meanwhile, John was praised when he learned a Korean word because he is a white man, which is at the top of the social hierarchy.

now while watching the video. Mia feels guilty that she assumed Eugene didn’t know anything. She questions if Eugene had been suffering for the last 14 years.

Anjeli presumed confidence and Eugene was able to consent to therapy by spelling yes.

Last Christmas, Mia bought Eugene Korean anime videos without subtitles because she assumed that they got in the way of him enjoying the cartoons on the screen. He got upset and snapped it in half. Mia realizes that he was frustrated because he had been reading the subtitles.

Detective Janice brings photos of the people who were using the ATM card. Neither of them is her father. Soon after, they get a voicemail saying Eugene was exposed to someone with COVID-19. Shannon and Detective Janice leave immediately.

**Trigger Warning**

We learn that Harmonee survived the war with her sister when a bomb killed the rest of their family. Soldiers were sexually assaulting them.

They realize that Anjeli has been hospitalized with COVID and was supposed to meet Adam and Eugene in the park. Mia realizes that her dad and Anjeli were not having an affair. The fantasy is easier to believe than believing that he is dead.

They find a transcript of the last session Anjeli had with Eugene. He expressed sadness that his dad did not believe he was capable; his mom treats him like a baby; John has so much positivity that to him, it doesn’t matter if Eugene can talk; and Mia thinks he’s stupid because he is non-speaking.

Hannah makes a sincere apology to Eugene.

Vic drove all the way from Ohio to help. He was at the park, and a woman tried to pepper-spray him. The police escorted him to Mia’s house to check out his story. He had been putting flyers everywhere to help find Adam. Vic found someone with a video, and he airdropped it to himself inconspicuously.

11:17 am: 1 hour after the mom blog video and 20 minutes before the run-in with the car. Eugene and Dad are in the park, and the video has Adam yelling

“No, Eugene, don’t do that. Eugene, noooo.”

Part V: This is not a Missing Person Story

Mia realizes that if you connect this video to the other video, it implicates Eugene. They need to come up with a better story that explains how Adam went missing, which also exonerates Eugene. Jon and Mia create an image of Dad saving Eugene and falling off the cliff in the process.

The family gets a notification that the police want to have a Zoom meeting with the lawyer. They set up a session with Anjali, and they refuse to allow the police to be there.

They realize that while Anjeli was in the hospital, her partner shared a note with the police. In the note, Eugene has spelled out “I hate dad. He’s ruining my life…” Eugene was expressing frustration that he was doing baby stuff at Henry House and wanted to show his family what he could do. The police see this note as proof and motive that Eugene hurt his father.

With Anjalee’s help, they set up the letter board for Eugene to tell his story. He explains over four hours, letter by letter, that he has his dad made up. He was able to write an apology letter. Dad took pictures of it.

They were supposed to meet Anjeli in the park, but she couldn’t come because she’d been hospitalized with COVID. There were boys in the park who called Eugene a “retard”. He got really mad, and a woman in the park pepper-sprayed him and Adam in the face. This is when Eugene started to lose control (in the first video).

Dad apologized to Eugene, and they started reading his HQ notebook together.

Throughout the book, Adam talks about happiness and how to get it. He talks about the Happiness Quotient, along with experiments that have been done over the years to predict happiness.

Scroll down to see the ending with spoilers.

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Review of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Happiness Falls Ending Explained (With Spoilers)

Eugene picked the trail near the waterfall. There he spotted red birds in a tree. He walked to look at the waterfall and had a jumping-jack contest. When they went back to the bench to retrieve their backpack, three boys were going through it. The boys said, “Look, it’s the R word”. They took Adam’s wallet and ran. Eugene tried to retrieve the backpack and started falling. He was screaming, and then Dad was gone.

In the Zoom meeting with the family, Shannon, Detective Janus, and Officer Higashida, Shannon asks to nullify the order for an arrainment based on Eugene’s description of events.

Detective Janis is reluctant to agree to “Eugene’s story” because she admits to having the bird watcher video. She knows that Vic had given them the recording before Eugene’s explanation of events. She says that Eugene’s account is an “ideal realistic story”. The detective thinks they made up the story to corroborate the video. She asks for further proof that Dad and Eugene had made up.

John says he knows where the papers are and runs to retrieve them from the shorts that Mia thought she had washed. There is something about this note that Mia finds strange.

Officer Higashida tells Janis to reopen the case if something else comes up. He nullifies the order and expunges Eugene’s record from the system.

Part VI: A Hundred Days
October 1, 2020

The family has always known that Eugene had severe motor issues. Mia wonders why they assumed he had an intellectual impairment as well. Anjali holds group sessions in her backyard where non-speakers can communicate in group therapy. Eugene is in a group with two other autistic kids who are learning to communicate with each other.

Adam’s case is declared an unresolved missing person case. When they spoke to his doctor, he explained that Adam had a positive test for prostate cancer, but was aware that there is a very high false positive rate on the blood test. He told half of his friends from Henry House that he had cancer and did not tell the other half. Was this his last experiment? We will never know if he had cancer.

Mia has unresolved questions. Was the last note real or forged, and if so, did Mom or John do it? Was Eugene’s story made up or real? Did he hear the story that Mia and John told themselves and incorporate that into his memories of the day?

Mia believes that the note was forged. It had too many abbreviations. She also found a note that her dad wrote on the photocopy machine. She believes they copied it darker and traced the letters so the handwriting would match.

Mia truly believes that Eugene may have accidentally bumped Dad over the edge. But they will never know if he was trying to restore the good memories of their father when giving them that story.

Mia wants answers and knows that she can find them on her father’s phone. She finally figures out the password to check if the apology note Eugene wrote was in Dad’s phone. The way Eugene explained it was. Instead, she types the wrong password and wipes his phone.

The Hundred Day Ceremony will be just the family in the park. The family donates a wooden bench for the overlook with a plaque that they will attach at the ceremony.

John and Mia read from The Little Prince. Mia dumps ashes over the side of the waterfall. These are the remains of their story (this book).

Mia surprises Eugene with a 24″ touch screen tablet that was preloaded with a text-to-voice function as well as a full-screen letter board. It also has a special stylus. Mia sets up the letterboard facing the waterfall. Eugene picks up the stylus and begins.

Main Characters

• Mia Parkson- narrator
• John Parkson- Mia’s Twin Brother
• Eugene Parkson- Mia’s Younger brother, who is Autistic and has Angelman Syndrome
• Hannah Park- Mia’s mom, Korean
• Adam Parson- Father, stay-at-home dad
• Detective Morgan Janus

Secondary Characters

• Harmonee- Korean Grandmother
• Shannon Haug- Lawyer
• Vic- Boyfriend

What to Read After Happiness Falls by Angie Kim: Book Recommendations

Kirsten and I will have the pleasure of discussing Happiness Falls with Angie Kim and our book club member on November 24th at 7:30 PM EST. Want to join us? Learn more below!

Epilogue

I hope you enjoyed this summary of Happiness Falls as much as I enjoyed writing it up. Did you find this helpful for preparing for book club? Did you like this book as much as I did?