Joy desires nothing more than her husband’s happiness. She spends her days creating the perfect life for him in their idyllic suburban home. Everything is neat, predictable, and in its place.

When Joy finds a picture that hints at a past she cannot remember, the facade cracks. As secrets are revealed, Joy realizes her blissful life is crumbling and to find herself, she must first lose herself.

Perfect, after all, is only an illusion.

I picked up ‘A Sorrow Named Joy‘ because it has a gorgeous cover, an intriguing title and was only seventy-nine pages long. I’m recommending it to people because it was the kind of story that lingers in the imagination. It was original and surprising and yet also felt truthful.

It’s the kind of story that I’d normally label as Speculative Fiction but, although it does speculate on things that might emerge in the future, those speculations are there to provide a framework for thinking about what it means to be alive and what we should do with the lives we have.

At the start of the story, when Joy was entirely focused on her husband’s happiness, I thought I might be heading into ‘Stepford Wives’ territory and wondered if there’d be enough that was new about that set of ideas to keep my attention. It turned out that ‘A Sorrow Named Joy’ twisted that trope so hard that it became something new and different. Where ‘The Stepford Wives‘ is an incarnation of misogyny and is filled with aggression and threat, ‘A Sorrow Named Joy‘ is an exploration of what happiness is, how it is achieved and the complex emotions that it evokes.

I loved being inside Joy’s head as she started to build her identity, expand her understanding of the world and began to make her own choices. What pulled me in was that her initial worldview wasn’t some drab colourless thing. Joy’s ability to lose herself in the possibilities offered by the food on the supermarket shelves or to impose order in her house or nurture her garden into a shape that matches her will, resonated with me. Then, as her perception started to shift, I was carried along by her emotional reaction to what she discovered.

Joy’s husband was a surprise. His reactions to the changes in Joy, anger, fear, sadness, guilt, felt real to me and opened up possibilities that the simple Predator / Victim dynamic of ‘The Stepford Wives‘ didn’t allow for.

By the end of the story, I felt I’d met two people who had supported each other through some difficult times and managed to find a path that fieed both of them to be as happy as the circumstances would allow. I loved that they began to find their way by admitting that they were unhappy.

Sarah Chorn packed a lot into those seventy-nine pages, ideas, emotions, paths to hope and all of it worked for me. I’ve added her novel ‘Of Honey And Wildfires‘ to my TBR pile.

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