Coming Sept 16, 2025. Available for pre-order now!
You Could Be Happy Here
How far would you go to find your true home?
Lucy—single, childless, in her thirties—teaches grade school science and is obsessed with insects, an unlikely source in her quest for insight into human behavior. Any progress she’s made on that front is lost when her mother dies prematurely, her sister claims the Northern California family home, and Lucy learns that her biological father may be a Costa Rican they knew when the family spent summers in the coastal village of Palmita.
Reeling, Lucy heads south in search of this phantom father and the land he may have bequeathed her. But he is nowhere to be found, and the dreamy, off-grid paradise she recalls from childhood has become a hard-edged town leery of hotel-building, forest-razing outsiders. Is Lucy an interloper, too? Or can she rise to the challenge: rethink her place in the world, open her heart, and expand her notion of kinship and home?
Praise
“Part family story, part travel adventure, part meditation on the challenges of belonging, Van Rheenen’s debut novel weaves these things together in a story that never goes where you think it’s going, but always takes you someplace wonderful.”
–Karen Joy Fowler, national bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Booth
“A brilliant debut novel that only a traveler could have written — a beautiful blend of travelers’ insights, natural history, and heartfelt truths about what it means to belong to a place—or have a place belong to you.”
–Pat Murphy, Nebula-winning author of The Adventures of Mary Darling
“Populated by a cast of colorful characters, and buoyed by the customs and culture of Costa Rica, You Could Be Happy Here is a wonderfully insightful story of one woman’s journey of discovery. Filled with humor, intriguing facts, and common sense, the reader soon learns that humanity and the natural world are more alike than we know. Erin Van Rheenen has written an auspicious debut novel!
–Gail Tsukiyama, national best-selling author of The Samurai’s Garden, The Color of Air, and The Brightest Star
“A surprising novel about family and what it means to belong. I found myself rooting for Lucy every step of the way.”
—Julia Scheeres, NYT bestselling author of Jesus Land
“Books take you on a journey and this one flies you directly to Costa Rica and into the heart and mind of Lucy, someone you feel you already know—either yourself or a good friend—about to deep dive into an exploration of her past, her present, and her future. You Could Be Happy Here vividly captures the tension of being a privileged foreigner in another country, as well as the profound understanding that we are all in this messy life together—that it’s all about forgiving each other for being human. Beautifully written and soul-searching.”
–Sharman Apt Russell, author of An Obsession with Butterflies and What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs.
“A young woman, a tropical paradise, and a past not quite become history—Erin Van Rheenen’s new novel is a pleasure to read, full of satisfying complexities.”
–Mary Ellen Hannibal, award-winning science writer and author of Citizen Scientist and Spine of the Continent
“With familial layers and a richness of place, You Could Be Happy Here encompasses the universal appeal of looking for home while stepping into the unknown. I was blown away by the beauty of the prose, as well as the wonder and pathos of the story.”
–Nikki Nash, author of Collateral Stardust
“Erin Van Rheenen’s sweeping debut You Could Be Happy Here explores how fundamental origin stories are to a person’s identity and sense of self in adulthood, and the disorienting impacts of mother loss and newly discovered paternity. Taking place in the United States and Costa Rica, this novel bridges the geographic, emotional and cultural gaps the complex characters encounter as they strive to find themselves and examine the new and historic connections that will either sustain or destroy them.”
–Polly Dugan, author of The House of Cavanaugh and The Sweetheart Deal
BEHIND THE BOOK
It’s funny how sometimes an arrangement of hills or the curve of a coastline can echo your own internal landscape. You’re not sure if the geography is imposing itself on you or if you’re seeing the place through a filter of your own feelings.
That’s how it was when I first saw Cabuya Island, on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. It’s not a true island, which is good because it functions as the local cemetery. It’s a tidal island, sometimes one thing—an island—and sometimes another—a peninsula. At low tide you can walk out to visit the graves, along a rocky spit that is swallowed back up by the sea at high tide.
The place’s neither-here-nor-thereness echoed my own displacement. I wasn’t young. I wasn’t old. I wasn’t home in California, and I hadn’t yet made a home for myself in Costa Rica. Recently divorced, I had thrown myself into researching a relocation guide, which took me to every corner of my newly adopted country. But as satisfying as that project was, it didn’t ease my loneliness or scratch the fiction itch that has plagued me since childhood.
I heard stories of the people buried on Cabuya Island, and I started to spin some of my own. I dreamed or channeled or invented a town-wide funeral for a man who had washed out to sea and then been flung back in with the tide. A man who had fathered a girl who hardly knew him, a girl who later in life would come looking for him.
As I worked on other projects, the world of You Could Be Happy Here began to reveal itself. It was a slow accrual of characters and situations, with my own preoccupations filtering in: Is blood really thicker than water? Where do I belong? Why do so many families implode when a parent dies, especially if there’s an inheritance involved?
You Could Be Happy Here is also grounded in my love for Latin America as a whole. Though I was born in Portland, Oregon, and schooled in New York City and Santa Cruz, California, my passion for place really blossomed in the southern reaches of the Americas.
I learned basic Spanish as a child near Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, where our family lived for several months, my father working as a doctor and my mother cooking on a hotplate and sweeping the scorpions out of the house. After college, I took off for South America, eventually landing in Quito, Ecuador, a more-than-mile-high city that was once the northernmost outpost of the Inca Empire. For two years I bumped around Quito on an old Vespa, read Thomas Pynchon novels, and taught Jane Fonda-style aerobics to the music of the Pixies and the Violent Femmes. Later, as a mid-career teacher in San Francisco, I took a sabbatical and moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where the quality of light left me asombrada (flabbergasted) each day and where from my apartment in a converted convent I could hear workmen chip new paving stones for a 450-year-old Spanish colonial church. While in Oaxaca I wrote a book that was never published and tried and failed to master the Spanish subjective (a verb “mood” rather than tense, which may explain why it’s so high maintenance). Still later, post-divorce, I moved to Costa Rica, looking for adventure and a fresh start. I found both, along with so many shades of green, I’m still counting. I fell hard for this small country with a big heart, basing myself in San José but traveling solo to research what became a 435-page relocation guide, Living Abroad in Costa Rica, and a bilingual children’s book, The Manatee’s Big Day.
Most of all, I wrote this book for YOU. Writers are nothing without readers. Thank you in advance for completing the circuit.
“It was a slow accrual of characters and situations, with my own preoccupations filtering in: Is blood really thicker than water? Where do I belong? Why do so many families implode when a parent dies, especially if there’s an inheritance involved?”