This book broke something in me at 11PM on a Tuesday when I should've been reviewing a postmortem doc.
I picked up the German edition of More Happy Than Not mostly because I've been trying to keep my German from fully atrophying (four semesters at UW, slowly dissolving into nothing), and Adam Silvera's YA sci-fi premise felt like the right difficulty level. Memory-erasure technology in the Bronx? Basically Eternal Sunshine but for a queer Latino teenager. I'm in. The same pull hit me with Hijo Dorado [Golden Son] — sci-fi dressing over a story that's really about identity, survival, and whether you get to choose who you become.
The Sci-Fi Is a Trojan Horse
Let me be upfront: if you're coming to this expecting hard sci-fi worldbuilding around the Leteo Institute's memory procedure, you'll be disappointed. The technology is a plot device, not a system to be explored. And honestly? That's fine. Because what Silvera actually built is a story about a kid named Aaron who's carrying so much grief and shame that erasing himself feels like the logical optimization. As someone who literally thinks in terms of optimizing systems — that hit different.
The structure is what got me. For the first few hours, you think you're listening to a pretty standard coming-of-age story. Aaron's dad's suicide, his own attempt (the smiley-face scar on his wrist comes up repeatedly, and Jonas Minthe reads those moments with this quiet restraint that's more devastating than any dramatic pause would be), his friendship with Thomas that's clearly becoming something else. Then around hour 4 or 5, Silvera pulls the rug out. I won't spoil it, but the reveal recontextualizes everything you've been listening to. I actually rewound three minutes because I thought I'd misheard something at 1.5x speed. I hadn't.
Jonas Minthe Carries the Weight
This is a single-narrator German performance, and Minthe has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Aaron's voice shifts between performative toughness with his Bronx crew and something much more vulnerable when he's alone with Thomas or processing his dad's death. Minthe nails that transition — there's no dramatic narrator voice switch, just a subtle softening that mirrors how Aaron actually behaves around people he trusts versus people he's performing for.
The German translation does something interesting with the Bronx slang — it doesn't try to find exact equivalents, which could've felt forced, but instead keeps a slightly informal register that works. Minthe's delivery stays grounded. He doesn't oversell the emotional beats, which is exactly right for a first-person YA narrator who's actively trying not to feel things.
One thing I noticed: the pacing in the middle third drags slightly. There's a stretch where Aaron's hanging with his friends playing this fictional card game (Scorpius Races, which is basically this universe's Magic: The Gathering), and while it builds the friend-group dynamics, at 1.5x I found my attention drifting during my morning commute through Millbrae. I bumped to 1.75x for those sections and it was fine.
The Part That Stuck With Me Past My Stop
There's a scene near the end — after Aaron has gone through with the procedure — where he encounters someone from his "before" life and doesn't recognize them. The way Minthe reads Aaron's confusion, this blankness where emotion used to live, genuinely unsettled me. It's the audio equivalent of watching someone's face go slack. You realize the book's title isn't aspirational. It's a warning. Being "more happy than not" through erasure isn't happiness. It's lobotomy with better marketing.
And look, I debug distributed systems for a living. I know what happens when you try to delete data that other systems depend on. Cascading failures. That's basically what happens to Aaron's identity, and Silvera understood that intuitively even without the tech metaphor.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you want pure sci-fi mechanics, skip this. The Leteo procedure has maybe 20 minutes of total explanation across 7.5 hours. But if you want a story that uses a sci-fi conceit to ask a genuinely uncomfortable question — would you delete the parts of yourself that cause you pain, even if they're you? — this delivers. Also worth skipping if you need your German-language audiobooks at a brisk pace; that middle third tests your patience even at 1.75x.
At 7 hours 36 minutes, it's a solid 4-commute listen. The German narration is clean and emotionally calibrated. Not the kind of book I'd normally pick up, but sometimes the best debugging happens when you look at a system you didn't build.
I texted Kevin "you should listen to this" at midnight. He said "is it about space?" It is not about space. He should still listen to it.
