By Anne Giardini. HarperCollinsCanada, 278 pp, $29.95, hardcover.

I don't believe in Happiness. Oh, that doesn't mean that there's not lots to like about former National Post columnist Anne Giardini's first novel, including the fact that it's set in a very recognizable Vancouver, populated by sad people living sad half-lives filled to varying degrees with aching and longing. But the book's central premise is so grievously flawed that it is, literally, incredible, and here's why.

When we first meet the story's narrator, Maggie Selgrin, she is, like her roommate Rebecca, "thirty-two years old, solvent, housed, gainfully employed, partly out from under the tidal pull of our families, and be?tween boyfriends". She works as a technician at a breast-cancer clinic and seems as solid and dependable as any other young adult-far more so than her sister Lucy, who floats between home and Rome, and between her steady Canadian boyfriend and her married Italian lover. Rebecca is also a paragon of normality, despite being a freelance writer, in part because she has steady and lucrative work crafting personality quizzes for various women's magazines. When she comes up with a test that's supposed to determine how long her readers will live, however, all hell breaks loose: Maggie completes the questionnaire and discovers she has only three months left to her, unless in that time she manages to find complete happiness.

This might be an amusing premise for a short story, but it can't sustain a novel, especially given that the first thing Giardini does is paint her central character as the kind of decent, self-possessed, and unsuperstitious soul who's unlikely to be thrown off course by something so trivial. And without a believable break from normality, the rest of Maggie's adventures-which range from dating a real estate-obsessed plastic surgeon to stealing Lucy's newborn baby-seem equally unlikely, despite Giardini's careful, understated prose.

Again, it's important to stress that there's talent here. Like her Pulitzer Prize-winning mother, Carol Shields, Giardini writes from the vantage of a calm, assessing eye, and her character sketches are The Sad Truth About Happiness's chief redeeming feature. But with a plot line that's impossible to fall for and an ending-happy, naturally-that seems overly pat, this is not an admirable book.