#Happy Hour Marlowe Granados

[pganotgolf]

Reflection of Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This is like Broad City in a book.

It’s such a good slice of life of a 20something living(struggling) in the big city

If you’re looking for a plot this isn’t the book but what is so great about it is how Marlowe describes the things , like things that you’ve felt but never put words to it (see fav quotations section)

Notes I took down while reading

- It’s like stream of consciousness but witty and similar to mine and my friends (so maybe it’s just the brain of a 20 something)

- “I wonder what I’ve done in life to be subjected to Alice Langley (bankrolled by her mother) telling me to grow up. What hypocrisy.”(100)

- Broad City if one of the friends was a bitch ,

- Wait she’s turning around

- actually nope

- But the chapters with Coop were definitely white lotus vibes

- Favorite chapter: August 6 (moms, grief)

- she never says “I feel like…” it’s always matter of fact

- This book reminds me of the song Rave Angel by Blusher

- SPOILER! it would’ve gotten 5 stars if the ending wasn’t hinting at the book being her released diary🤦‍♀️

Here’s a list of my favorite quotations from the book:

- Being inside when it rains makes you forget that anything else could be happening (89)

- She pulled out a… burgundy velvet dress… Light disappeared into it; velvet has a way of doing that (92)

- “You need to grow and have some respect for yourself”. I hate lines like this. They’ve been abused so much they’ve lost their meaning. When you really think about it, they’re designed to cause the most hurt with the least effort. You Should Have Some More Respect for Yourself. (100)

- It’s a sad thing when people take beautiful old buildings and try to modernize it. Some things are meant to be restored, not re-interpreted (121)

- I want all the tenderness in the world. It’s a natural urge to want to be important in someone’s life. The soft underbelly of a course man. A preview is never enough because I am insatiable. (150)

- People forget I can be cruel too. I can devastate just about anyone.(152)

- (Fashion) is an important kind of knowledge that is overlooked. In many cases, it’s the first mode of expression women have access to. (168)

- I sat in the windowsill listening to the birds chirp and the occasional car drive by. It’s funny how seamlessly nights end and mornings begin, and yet they feel quite different. (182)

- … I am always interested in finding things. You can take a piece of junk and turn it into a talisman. You can assign it meaning and its own moment in time and store it in a box somewhere. I have an old champagne time filled with trinkets like that. I only ever open it when I’m feeling particularly blue. It’s just a case of remembering things. Sometimes when you’re set on forgetting, you have to know what direction to forget. (202)

- Sometimes I think I must be attached to reality by a thin string (202)

- Daylight crept through the windows, a reminder that things are always going on without you no matter what. Death is not unspeakable, but it often feels that way. (218)

- “ I know how hard it must have been to have me. I am the age she was when she became pregnant. Daughters make single mothers more vulnerable than lone women. Even when I was small I could sense that. My existence had put her in a precarious position where she was to protect both me and herself. (219-220)

- They look at me and say, “I don’t know how you do it.” I am not strong! I want to tell them. I am simply enduring. (222)

- It would be nice if whenever someone said, “I love you,” it meant, “Everything will be fine.” It’s all reassurance anyway. (222)

- Sometimes I wonder, if I ever went missing, how long it would take for someone to realize. Considering how long they are used to not hearing from me, I’d I were really in danger, I think it would take them about three weeks. (223)

- Anyone who prefers minimalism probably had everything growing up. When you are never left wanting, you never want much. (240)

- Love and not eating for sixteen hours feels more or less the same. (241)

- I decided to be honest (247)

- Sometimes making bad decisions really takes no time at all. In fact, you realize that you’ve been itching to do it all along. Deep down, I think comes from being so angry at having to restrict yourself all the time because in the end, no matter how well you behave someone always Dash away your life‘s work with little to no regard. We’re always swimming against the tide. How’s that for Justice? If I am reckless, it is because I am tired. (258)

- The bodegas have already brought out parts of mom’s in heartening colors. They clustered together in rich, fuchsia‘s oranges and reds a sign that summer is on its last breath, and these are the flowers that will guide us into fall (262)

[theisisnicolemag]

Marlowe Granados for The Isis Nicole Magazine Issue 11

Photography: Sabra Binder (@sabrabinder)⁠ Interview: Isaac Kariuki (@isaackariuki.jpg)⁠ Styling: Branden Ruiz (@branden.ruiz)⁠ Makeup: Alex Kleeman (@theonlyalexkleeman)⁠ Photo Assistant: Calibey Craig (@cralibey)⁠ Production & Creative Direction: Hannah Black (@pinkvariegated)

[sealskin]

To All the Final Girls, 2023

[haveyoureadthispoll]

With the verve and bite of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the whip-smart, wisecracking sensibility of a golden-age Hollywood heroine, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

[samireads]

Feb wrap up 😗✌🏻

[mindless23]

“If you spend enough time with anything, you start liking it, even sadness.”

do you ever feel lost without sadness? like without sadness i am nothing. so i pull myself back into it

“Life can be boring when you have nothing to cry about.”

Amish Tripathi, Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta // text from me to a friend // Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour

[toadtaro]

“I supposed to savour is to hold something in your mouth for more than a moment, to linger and draw out its details. Sometimes you are far too hungry to wait, and things get lost. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that I write things into remembrance. I like to linger long enough to name pleasurable things and seek out more.”

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

[natalka777]

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados- Post read thoughts (least reviewing review)

‘Happy Hour’ was not a breath of fresh air, it was a breath of the city smog, a breath of cigarette smoke, a breath of hopeless youth. Not a book but a feeling, a snapshot and a product of its time. Reading, I usually feel like im looking through a window into another world, but Isa grabbed me by my hand and pulled me through into the dusty yet charming streets of New York. I think I read this book at the perfect time of my life, at 18 , at a bridge from girlhood to womanhood and Isa and Gala convinced me to hold on to my girlhood, the carelessness and stupidity, for as long as i can. Just like if I read ‘Happy Hour’ at 30 years old, or if my mother read it now and would curse the indulgence and self-serving air of arrogance surrounding the still young and pretty characters, in the same way i will probably recount the events of my youth. The ages 18-21 are a special time for a girl, in my opinion, when you’re not quite a girl anymore but not quite a woman, a feeling like trying on your mothers high heels as a child. This awkward transitional period, hidden under unwavering cheek and confidence is exactly what ‘Happy Hour’ serves you on a plate. A time capsule of girlish mischief and mistakes, with three dimensional characters that are just like me and the people around me, with their flaws, cruel remarks and destructive decisions.

I know I will go back to this book, to this review, to these years of my life and look back on them fondly, but with a shaking of the head. But it is important to not lose these dirty, embarrassing moments and I, like Isa and Gala, will keep them on their own page of my mental diary to look back on years later in a different time.

[heartshapedness]

- happy hour by marlowe granados

[ninasbookshelf]

[bentobih]

“I have tried to stitch together tenderness from each person. Wring them of it. I want all the tenderness in the world… The soft underbelly of a coarse man. A preview is never enough because I am insatiable.”

Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados

[lazysummerwords]

It's just that turning a night into some form of romance takes us out of ourselves. It's a chance to see who we are through the eyes of someone who doesn't really know us. How else can we learn what is effective?

Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados

[theisisnicolemag]

Marlowe Granados for The Isis Nicole Magazine Issue 11

Photography: Sabra Binder (@sabrabinder)⁠ Interview: Isaac Kariuki (@isaackariuki.jpg)⁠ Styling: Branden Ruiz (@branden.ruiz)⁠ Makeup: Alex Kleeman (@theonlyalexkleeman)⁠ Photo Assistant: Calibey Craig (@cralibey)⁠ Production & Creative Direction: Hannah Black (@pinkvariegated)

[wiredoceans]

To be free to communicate without consequence—is that ever a possibility? I want to say, “I don’t want you to have feelings about my feelings.” I want to be heard without consequence because to be heard is such a novelty. If someone asks while looking me straight in the eye, I slither away. Even though we are looking at each other, I am still hiding. My dark eyes are good for that. The feelings on the tip of my tongue have no shape; they’re listless, always trying to sneak up in a moment of poignancy. Sometimes what I want to say is “I feel trapped!” Sometimes it is “I resigned myself to a fate I thought I wanted, but now I don’t!”

Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados

[iishtar]

It’s not just that I find Granados’s city unrecognizable. It’s boring! The parties are lame, the dialogue is tedious, the sex and pathos occur offscreen. Here’s what gets me about the whole Literary It-Girl discourse — if you’re gonna write a novel, you can’t be too cool for school. Yes, literary fiction is stuffy and pretentious. But prose isn’t a visual medium: if you want to be an influencer, a ringlight and an ab routine will pay quicker dividends. The coolest thing you can do as a novelist is go for it. I’m not saying you need to write The Recognitions, but the format lends itself to characterization and detail. Why read a novelist who’d rather be on Instagram?

Pete Tosiello [x]

[readingtostaysane]

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados - review

rating: ⭐⭐⭐ (3.5)

“I want to be heard without consequence because to be heard is such a novelty. If someone asks while looking me straight in the eye, I slither away. Even though we are looking at each other, I am still hiding. My dark eyes are good for that. The feelings on the tip of my tongue have no shape; they’re listless, always trying to sneak up in a moment of poignancy. Sometimes what I want to say is “I want you to be mine!” Sometimes it is “I feel trapped!” Sometimes it is “I resigned myself to a fate I thought I wanted, but now I don’t!” But I have yearnings, that’s true. I make choices. I take action. That is simply how I navigate. But isn’t it who I am who goes out into the world? Do those few lonely moments when I return inward, away from noise and glamour, really count?”

Happy hour is a book that is purely vibes living our best summer in New York. I had so much fun reading this book, having never been to New York myself i felt as if i was experincing the city with the characters. The main character is funny, witty and you never get bored of her adventures.

Isa and Gala are two girls who are illegally in the country therefore they cannot work normal jobs which causes them to always live on edge when it comes to money. They party at night with elite people and work through the day in street markets. Although the first half of the book where they do go to these parties was very enjoyable I was hoping to meet more interesting people as the book progressed. You can also argue that this was the author’s intention in portraying a New York so full of life yet so incredibly filled with boring and dull people.

With that said, I think the book could have dived deeper in some of its themes. The disparity between rich and poor people in New York, although explored could have benefited with more characters struggling to survive in the city, instead of only our two main characters.

Isa and Gala are not exactly likable nor do they have to be for you to enjoy this book, in fact i appreciated the characters being so very flawed and making absolute stupid decisions over and over again, it gave them substance, it made them human. It kept things interesting and you were always on edge thinking “how could these girlbosses make this situation even worse” i love drama in my books !! They are funny and that’s why it’s such an easy read.

“Being a young girl is always a cute trick. It leaves nothing to be desired and it is easy. I feel as though becoming a woman is like a long tradition of going through things and coming out strong, but I am tired and weary!”

The best part of this book is Isa’s inner thoughts and her very astute observations over the people that surround her. She is a slave of the system she lives in and has to take the best she can out of every situation. Ee see her make these moves to survive over and over again, sometimes she’s smart about it but other times she isn’t, and that’s what makes it a compelling story.

conclusion: this is a great summer read !! It gives you fun, interesting characters but doesn't have a plot you need to pay close attention to. It shows you the ins and outs of a great city and keeps you entertained throughout the whole novel.