Living Happy!

Book Description from the publisher:

How would your life be different if you were just a bit happier every day for a year? What would you do to enjoy life just a little more day by day? Take your first step toward increased happiness with The Year of Living Happy: Finding Contentment and Connection in a Crazy World by Alli Worthington.
You do your best to live life well—you work hard to be present in the moment, take care of the people in your life, knock it out of the park at work and home. And yet somehow, you still have days (perhaps more than you'd like to admit) where you're simultaneously stressed and bored, and you wonder if you even know how to be happy. Is happiness a worthy goal? Does happiness matter to God, or does He only care about holier things?
Alli Worthington gets it. As a wife, mother of five boys, author, speaker, and entrepreneur, she knows a thing or two about being busy, stressed, and happy in the midst of a crazy world! Over the years, she's seen how happiness gets a bad rap in Christian circles, and now she is standing up to shout the good news from the roof (or the internet, as the case may be): You are allowed to be happy! Yes, you! You can be happy right now!
Get rid of the common Christian misconception that happiness is somehow not holy, and grasp God’s intention for His children—that happiness and holiness can coexist for a beautiful life.
Join Alli for The Year of Living Happy: Finding Contentment and Connection in a Crazy World and find the roots of your happiest life yet! With 100 inspirational devotions, beautiful art, and journaling pages throughout, this gorgeous devotional offers practical ways to make your life happier day by day.
Don’t miss the great big beautiful adventure God has for you right in your own life. Let this be The Year of Living Happy!

My Review:
I do not think the UPS truck was even out of my driveway when I was already flipping through this book!  The cover alone is gorgeous and so enticing that I could not wait and this book is even nicer in person than it looks in the picture!  "The Year of Living Happy" is a beautiful, hardcover edition with a ribbon to mark your place, and the pages have a border of the same yellow on the cover which makes the pages look so nice as well.  I am thoroughly impressed with the look and feel of the book, and that is before I even started reading it! 
Alli Worthington has created such a wonderful collection of devotional readings in this book!  There are 100 different readings, and they are divided into 12 chapters by category; for example there is a chapter focusing on friends, another focusing on happiness in your mind (all about gratitude and mindset!), another section focusing on being happy when it is hard to be.   When you open the book to a reading, you see the entire devotional as it spans the two page layout.  The reading typically is about a page and quarter, then there is a box with a few statements or questions for the reader to reflect on, followed by blank lines for the reader to write down the reflections.  This layout is another great feature to this book. 
I am going to go through this book one reading a day and work through the reflection and journaling part as well.  However, there were just so many things that were jumping out at me I just had to keep turning the pages and reading.  One in particular was titled Life is not a Pinterest Board; I am a huge fan of Pinterest, however it is easy for me to get caught in the mindset of not being good enough or not being able to do these amazing looking projects.  Alli encourages that you take a break for 7 days from activities that make you feel less than and journal about that to see how you feel, how those days are overall, what a great challenge!  Life can be crazy and overwhelming and it is so easy to get caught up in comparisons and living just trying to make it through each day and not really living life how you want; this book is a great one to challenge you on things like that and really seek to live happier each day.  This would make a such a nice thinking of you gift or be a great encouragement to someone you know!

*Thanks to the BookLook Bloggers Program for the complimentary copy of this book.*