CANR

• Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie - 2025 Mariner Books, New York, NY

• Jordan LaHaye Fontenot website - https://jordanlahayefontenot.com/

  Born and raised in the culturally rich region of Acadiana in South Louisiana, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s work as a writer and editor is an ongoing exploration of how the past interacts with the present, in a place where tradition reigns.

  A graduate of Louisiana State University and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction, her writing has appeared in regional and international publications including inRegister, Atlas Obscura, and the Oxford American.

  She was a Writer-in-Residence at NUNU Arts and Culture Collective in Arnaudville in 2022 and 2023 and a featured writer at the 2021 annual Society of Professional Journalists Conference, the 2023 Louisiana Book Festival, and the 2023 Delta Mouth Literary Festival. Her work has been published most extensively in the Louisiana arts and culture magazine Country Roads, which she has overseen as editor since 2018.

  Jordan is the author of the National Bestseller HOME OF THE HAPPY: A MURDER ON THE CAJUN PRAIRIE—an investigative memoir that follows her journey as she unravels the mysteries surrounding the 1983 kidnapping and murder of her great grandfather, Aubrey LaHaye in Mamou, Louisiana.

• Country Roads - https://countryroadsmagazine.com/topics/jordan-lahaye-fontenot/

  RSS
  Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
  IMG_7236-3-(1).jpg
  Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is the Managing Editor of Country Roads magazine, and has been a part of the editorial team since 2018. Born and raised in the heart of Acadiana, she came to Country Roads with a passion for Louisiana storytelling. She holds a degree in English from Louisiana State University, where she received the 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction. In addition to her work at Country Roads, she has published stories in regional and international publications including inRegister, Atlas Obscura, and the Oxford American. Her first book Home of the Happy: A murder on the Cajun Prairie, will be published by Mariner Books in 2025.

• The Current - https://thecurrentla.com/2025/paradise-lost-a-family-history-of-murder-on-the-bayou/

  April 18:30 am
  Paradise lost? A family history of murder on the bayou
  by Erin Bass
  A woman sits in front of a lake with cypress trees at sunset
  Jordan LaHaye Fontenot dug into her own family history, specifically her great-grandfather's unnatural death. Photo by Olivia Perillo
  All families have their secrets, that thing no one talks about. Maybe it’s an illegitimate child, divorce, drugs or alcoholism. For Jordan LaHaye Fontenot, it was kidnapping and murder.

  Growing up on Vidrine Road, just outside Mamou, Fontenot knew her great-grandfather had been murdered. His body had been found in a nearby bayou, and her great-grandmother, MawMaw Emily, had been tied to the bed in their home — an image that stuck with Fontenot. She never got a chance to meet PawPaw Aubrey. He was murdered more than a decade before she was born.

  “It definitely felt like something that had happened so long ago,” she says, sitting at the dining room table in her plantation-style home off Rue de Belier in Lafayette on a chilly January morning. It wasn’t until she started writing about Acadiana and Evangeline Parish in college that the tragic family story came up in a conversation with her father. “That made me realize how recent it was, that someone who could have done this was still in prison and alive,” she remembers.

  Her growing curiosity led her to a newspaper article about the trial that called into question whether the man convicted, John Brady Balfa, was actually guilty. Soon after, Fontenot, who serves as managing editor of Country Roads Magazine, embarked on a journey that ended with a major book deal at just 25 years old.

  Her first book, Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie, releases April 1 and is the result of an eight-year process of trying to find out what really happened to her great-grandfather Aubrey LaHaye.

  Home of the Happy opens with “Part 1: The Murder” and the day LaHaye’s body was found in Bayou Nezpique (pronounced “Nip-ee-kay”) on Jan. 16, 1983.

  A family spotted what looked like a body wrapped in a tarp floating in the bayou while out shooting beer cans on a bridge. LaHaye had been missing for 10 days after being kidnapped from his home in the early morning hours of Jan. 6.

  After visiting the site with her father, Dr. Marcel LaHaye, Fontenot posits that her great-grandfather may not have been the only body disposed of in the remote creek. “There is a legacy of silent tragedy in this bayou, of bodies sunk in her waters, nestled on her banks,” she writes.

  The Glenn Armentor Law Corporation
  Despite its violent centerpoint, the book is as much a love letter to Fontenot’s home of Evangeline Parish as it is an investigation.

  “The relationship to the place, as well as the relationship to my family and my relationship with the world is a slow realization that I saw a really bright, sunny part of it all, and that it’s much more complicated and darker than that,” she says.

  The title of the book, “Home of the Happy,” is a phrase lifted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.” Fontenot first read the poem in sixth grade at Sacred Heart Elementary in Ville Platte. Today, she finds parallels to her own family’s story.

  “It’s like this lost paradise of things being wonderful and then something terrible happening and disrupting that,” she says. “This is paradise, but paradise is never what it seems.”

  Fontenot had her dad in her corner, but she felt like she needed to ask her grandfather, Dr. Wayne LaHaye, for his permission to pursue a book about his own father.

  “He said: ‘I always thought someone would do this eventually. I’m glad it’s someone in our family,’ but I could tell he was never comfortable with the whole thing,” Fontenot recalls. The rest of her family members were mostly supportive and ready to help, she says. Some seemed glad the big family secret was finally out in the open.

  Just recently, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Fontenot asked all of Aubrey LaHaye’s grandchildren to meet for a family book launch. She handed out early copies to the people she is most excited and nervous about reading what she’s written. “They all came,” she says, “and it was powerful for us all to send it out together into the world.”

  But it wasn’t just her own family she had to worry about. In the process of her investigation, Fontenot formed a relationship with the convicted Balfa’s family and the attorney trying to prove his innocence. She even planned to testify in support of Balfa in court at one point, a tough spot to find herself in as a journalist and author.

  “There was a certain point where I couldn’t be as objective as I wanted anymore, and I had to kind of come to terms with that and what it meant for how I was going to tell the story,” she says. “I’m trying to be balanced and fair, always, but I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence either way.”

  While the book recounts the LaHaye family history and what has come to be known as “the dark decade” in family lore, it’s also a story of convict John Brady Balfa and his own family origins.

  Balfa is the nephew of legendary Cajun musician Dewey Balfa, and his dad, Harry, played accordion in the Balfa Brothers band. John Brady had no interest in music and had been pursuing a political science degree at Louisiana State University before dropping out of school and taking a job at Sunland Construction in Eunice, where he was working at the time of his arrest. After his conviction for the murder of Fontenot’s great-grandfather, his dream of eventually following in the footsteps of his hero Edwin Edwards was shattered. He has been imprisoned at Angola for going on 40 years.

  Fontenot sees similarities between the two families that she describes in a chapter titled “Things I Know About John Brady Balfa.”

  “People in Mamou went to see Dr. Wayne LaHaye when they were sick, and they visited John Brady’s mother, Mildred, whenever they needed their hair done,” she writes. “They negotiated their mortgages with Aubrey LaHaye at Guaranty Bank, and then called Harry Balfa to install their kitchen cabinets.”

  Harry Balfa also drove the local school bus, so when it came time for jury selection in the trial, most people knew one family or the other. John Brady’s attorney argued for a change of venue, but the trial remained local and became known› as “one of the biggest spectacles in the collective Evangeline Parish memory.”

  Fontenot had a rough book proposal that doubled as her honors thesis coming out of Louisiana State University in 2018, but wasn’t ready to share it with the world yet.

  Her book stalled as she moved houses, got married during the pandemic and mourned her grandfather’s death. Her dad finally encouraged her to write a query letter. When she saw that the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival was offering a critique panel with young agents, she signed up and got five minutes with Mina Hamedi with Janklow & Nesbit, who liked her idea and invited her to send a formal query.

  It only took about two months for Hamedi to sell what would become Home of the Happy to Mariner Books — an imprint of HarperCollins that has notably published George Orwell’s 1984 and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

  For Fontenot, what followed was a “whirlwind.” She was given a year and an advance to finish the book. She turned it in just as the 2022-2023 HarperCollins strike got going and lost her editor, bringing progress on the publication of her work to a slow crawl.

  In the end, the wait was worth it. Her new editor, Ivy Givens, was from the South and understood Fontenot’s vision for the book. She helped her to cut and restructure to better move back and forth between historical information and her own present-day research, the author says.

  The final structure is divided into five parts. Chapters act as vignettes with titles like “The Alibi,” “At Harry Balfa’s House,’ “The Alcatraz of the South” and “The Greatest Man That Ever Was,” a reference to Fontenot’s great-grandfather.

  “In most of the memories my family members hold, PawPaw Aubrey remains firmly immortalized in his most recent self, his grandfatherhood,” she writes. “A fat old man in a suit and cowboy hat, driving to the bank every day and sitting in his recliner in the evenings, smoking a cigar.”

  “The adoration was so overwhelming, and I was like, this can’t possibly be the most accurate portrayal of this man,” she says. “He had to be more complicated than that.” All she could find was a news article about LaHaye attending a rally in support of segregation. The main subject of her book remained elusive.

  “I went in really naively, thinking I was going to find out the truth, and I didn’t know what it would be,” she shares. She sent a letter to the man still serving time for the crime, hoping to strike up a correspondence and get his side of the story.

  “It was a search for truth,” she says. “The further I went in, the more evident it became that the truth was going to be really hard to find, maybe impossible.”

  In the end, it was a family member who was pushed into the frame as a suspect. Their possible involvement, along with a bombshell from the Angola archives revealed toward the end of the book, almost gives Fontenot the answers she’s been searching for.

  Proceedings to prove Balfa’s innocence are still ongoing, and a hearing is expected to take place this year. An audiobook recorded by actress Christine Lakin from the ‘90s sitcom “Step by Step” comes out the same day as the book, April 1. Fontenot also has an agent with United Talent shopping the story around for TV and film. She envisions “True Detective” vibes.

  Fontenot will be at Cavalier House Books in conversation with her dad, moderated by Country Roads Editor James Fox-Smith, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 1. More book events follow through June 12.

• inRegister - https://www.inregister.com/features/home-of-the-happy

  Author Jordan LaHaye Fontenot talks her debut book and the family tragedy that inspired it all
  April 1, 2025 |By Riley Bienvenu Bourgeois
  From an essay in a creative writing class to a college thesis to a newly published book, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s author debut is the result of nearly a decade of work—and the young writer is only in her late 20s. In Home of the Happy, the former inRegister intern investigates the mysterious circumstances of her great-grandfather’s 1983 murder in Mamou, Louisiana, the place where she also grew up.

  Interviewing friends, family and others, she delves into the elusiveness of the truth and the lasting toll of a tragedy like this. But underneath the case itself, Fontenot’s book also showcases the beauty of South Louisiana, the love of a family and the ties that bind us all.

  Read on to hear from Fontenot herself.

  Have you always wanted to be an author? What has your journey to this accomplishment been like?

  There is a funny little origin story. I have this memory of my kindergarten teacher showing our class a children’s book and describing the difference between an author and an illustrator and just being so fascinated and even obsessed with the concept of “an author.” I was a big reader at a young age—I was part of this group of friends in like fourth and fifth grade that would read books at recess. And around that time, I wrote a short story that my grandfather had “published” into a “book”—really more like a pamphlet with some clip art, and it was my most prized possession.

  So, the dream was there really early, but around the time I got to high school, it began to feel more remote and unrealistic, in the same category as becoming a professional singer or a movie star. I became more self-conscious about the writing I was doing, less proud of it.
  When I started college, I majored in English, thinking I would find a job in copywriting or teaching. I wasn’t really sure what I would do, but English had always just been the part of school I enjoyed the most. It wasn’t until around junior year, when I started learning about long-form nonfiction and taking some journalism classes, that creative writing began to feel like something I could pursue as a career.

  Home of the Happy started as an essay about my great-grandfather’s murder for my first creative writing class. But then, I kept digging into the mysteries of the story and just got kind of obsessed. When I had gathered a certain amount of information, a professor eventually told me that this project could be a book. And it kind of clicked, like this was the path the whole time.

  Author Jordan LaHaye Fontenot. Photo by Olivia Luz Perillo
  Tell us a little about the story. What can readers expect?

  The book is an account of my journey re-investigating my great-grandfather’s kidnapping and murder in 1983 (13 years before I was born) in Mamou, Louisiana. It was a story I grew up knowing about, but in the vague sense of “this crazy thing happened a long, long time ago.”

  But when I was in my early 20s, I started to ask more questions. I had this somewhat sudden realization that this had happened not all that long ago and that it had profoundly impacted the lives of my father, my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles. And really, my entire hometown. Many people are still carrying around unresolved trauma, and across our community, there remains this pall of doubt and conspiracy about the whole event.

  The reader follows me as I uncover the details of the day Aubrey LaHaye was taken from his home, the ten days of search parties and FBI investigations that followed before his body was found in the Bayou Nezpique, and the ultimate trial and conviction of John Brady Balfa. I interview family members and people across the community, dig into newspaper archives and court documents, question conspiracy theories, and try to draw out answers and truth from a case that has been shrouded in mystery for 40 years now.

  Beneath the story of the crime itself is also an account of my shifting relationship to my home. The darkest parts of my family’s past are layered over the very same physical landscape of my own, really quite idyllic, childhood. The bayou where Aubrey’s body was found, for instance, is the same bayou that ran right by my house growing up. The house where he was kidnapped from is my Parrain’s house now, a place I return to each year for Christmas and baby showers. It’s where my own engagement party was held, right in the middle of my work on this book.

  What was it like taking on such a deeply personal story/investigation for your first book? What were the challenges?

  For me, writing has always been a deeply personal exercise. Writing about my life, my home and my family is where I am most comfortable. I say this now as I keep trying to write something fiction, something far away from Evangeline Parish, Louisiana—and keep finding myself back in the realm of documentation and memoir.

  So, in a sense, the actual writing of this book came very naturally. The research, though, was where the challenges arose. There were many very difficult, vulnerable conversations with family members—who were all incredibly generous with me in sharing their stories. There were absolutely moments during the interviews and research that were just devastating to uncover and contemplate and then find a way to write about. I definitely had to take breaks because it got really heavy at certain points.

  There were also a lot of moments in writing this book where I feared I was getting to places that might hurt people, either by revealing new and painful information I’d uncovered or by making public things that have, until now, been kept within the confines of our family and community. There was a constant weighing of journalistic objectivity against my responsibility to my family, and I certainly fell on either side of that balance at different points in the book. There is no way to be 100% objective in telling a story like this, and I tried to transparently lay that struggle on the page.

  Is there anything you learned or any moments you experienced during the writing process that have stuck with you?

  As a young journalist, the biggest lesson this project has taught me is how elusive, and maybe even mythic, absolute truth can be. When you’re dealing with histories, you’re dealing with narratives told from particular perspectives. What I had to work with, piecing this story together, were decades-old memories, secondary sources, and the exaggeration of talented Cajun storytellers. Not to mention missing and redacted records, error-ridden news articles, and straight-up lies. It was a total wild-goose chase!

  My work as a writer, in general, tends to sit somewhere between journalism and essay, and I think my book is a work that somewhat grapples with that—the tension between gathering information in the interest of relaying fact and attempting to make sense of mystery.

  While navigating the frustrations of figuring out how to hold all of this in my book, it struck me deeply that when we receive histories that are tidy, with a beginning, middle, and end and a clear, satisfying resolution, well, the truth is that someone likely inserted their fiction somewhere to make them that way. It took me a while to figure out, but for this story, certainly, the most honest thing in the end was to lay the ambiguities and the complications and the unanswerable questions bare.

  Were there any unexpected moments throughout the process?

  There were many, but perhaps the most incredible was—years into my research—learning that the man convicted of my great-grandfather’s murder, John Brady Balfa, was (and still is) actively seeking post-conviction relief based on an innocence claim. That revelation gave the entire story, overnight, a renewed sense of urgency.

  Has your family read the book? How did they react?

  My immediate family, my parents and brothers, have. My dad’s opinion was the one that mattered most—he’s really been my biggest supporter and confidante all the way through. He’s also my direct connection to the story itself, my primary source. He called me late the night he finished it and told me … just … everything I needed to hear from him. It was pretty emotional for both of us.

  It was interesting to get my brothers’ impressions. There’s been so much silence around this event, and most of our generation only knows the barest details of it. I’ve been living so close to the story these past eight or so years, and now my cousins and my brothers can share in this history, our history, too.

  How long did it take for this project to come to fruition, from idea to publishing?

  It has been a long haul—almost an entire decade! I wrote the first essay in early 2017, which is also when I started interviewing my family members. The plan was to use the essay as my honors thesis at LSU. Eventually, that project expanded into a book proposal, which I submitted to a committee in 2018.

  In the years after graduation, I worked on the book in fits and starts—doing more research than writing, kind of dragging my feet (imposter syndrome) about starting the publishing process. But in 2021, I finally decided to begin querying literary agents. I was incredibly fortunate to meet my agent, Mina Hamedi, early in the process, and things took off from there. She sold the proposal to Mariner Books (an imprint of HarperCollins) by the end of the year, and I spent all of 2022 finishing it under contract, turning in the final manuscript in January of 2023. From there, various circumstances between the publishing industry and the court system forced us to push the book’s release back a few times. But we’re finally here!

  What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

  Gosh, there are layers to that question. For Louisiana readers, I hope that there is a recognition and appreciation of our world as something multidimensional, not all jolly fiddlers and crawfish, nor government corruption and mafia underworlds—but all of it, and so much more. For non-Louisiana readers, I hope to draw a new and energized eye to this strange and beautiful part of America and the deeply complicated people who live here.

  And for all readers, I hope that people can see in my family’s story the far-reaching impact of violence and trauma across a community and through the generations, and that healing can look different for everyone. I believe some of my family survived this by suppressing the story—staying silent about it. But that silence did come with a price.

  What can we expect from you in the future? Do you have future projects on the horizon?

  Not quite on the horizon, but perhaps just beyond it. I’ve started and stopped a few potential book projects over the past year, but I am still in a place of ideating and experimentation. Just getting used to writing for fun again, writing about anything other than family trauma and murder. Right now, I’m leaning towards an essay collection—but ask me again in six months!

  How can readers connect with you?

  Readers can find me on Instagram @jordanlahayefontenot. They can also subscribe to my (free!) newsletter “In the Home of the Happy” on Substack, where a few times a month, I share behind-the-scenes and bonus material on the book, my family history and my writing life.

  Throughout April, I’ll also be going on a book tour around Louisiana, and would love to meet readers and sign their books in person! Upcoming Baton Rouge area events include a presentation at the EBRPL Main Library at Goodwood on April 16 at 6 p.m., the Country Roads magazine launch at St. Francisville’s The Conundrum on April 25 at 5:30 p.m., and Indie Bookstore Day at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs on April 26 at 1 p.m. Other dates in Lafayette, New Orleans, and beyond will be listed on my Instagram, Substack, and website.

• Louisiana State University website - https://www.lsu.edu/blog/2025/09/jordan-home-of-the-happy.php

  LSU Alum Turns Honors Thesis Into Bestselling True Crime Memoir
  By Morgan Reese

  September 30, 2025

  For LSU alum Jordan Lahaye Fontenot, what started as her honors thesis has grown into a bestselling true crime memoir. “Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie” explores the devastating murder of Fontenot’s great-grandfather and the lasting effects it had on her family and hometown.

  Fontenot originally started the project as a shorter work of creative nonfiction that she envisioned becoming a long-form essay on the murder of her great-grandfather, Aubrey Lahaye. She proposed this idea to Joshua Wheeler, LSU associate professor of English, as a potential subject for her honors thesis.

  “He suggested that I instead write a book,” Fontenot said. “With his help, I was able to prepare a book proposal, which served as my thesis and set me on the long path of publication.”

  Placeholder Image
  Cover of Fontenot's book, "Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie"

  The book follows Fontenot’s journey as she re-investigates the tragic events of January 6, 1983. Her grandfather, an influential banker, farmer, and business man in the area, was kidnapped from his home at the age of 70. After 10 days of investigation by the Evangeline Parish Sheriff's Department, the Louisiana State Police, the FBI, and hundreds of local volunteers, his body was discovered in the Bayou Nezpique.

  Fontenot struggled with writing about her family’s tragedy but chose to channel that pain into her work.

  “The most difficult moments were when I stepped outside of the lenses of journalism, which guided so much of the project, and found myself grappling with the reality of how much my family has been through,” Fontenot said. “I wouldn’t say I overcame those difficult moments so much as I channeled them into the storytelling itself—which I hope made the book more honest, in the long run.”

  Because she grew up in Louisiana, Fontenot was able to dig deep into her family’s past and center the book around the community and landscape of Evangeline Parish.

  Jordan Lahaye Fontenot
  What started as an LSU assignment, turned Jordan Lahaye Fontenot into a best-selling author.

  – Photo courtesy Jordan Lahaye Fontenot

  “Louisiana is as much a character in this book as anyone—small town, rural, French Louisiana in particular,” Fontenot said. “There’s a distinct cultural matrix in Evangeline Parish that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world that created the community at the center of my book, that created my family, and that created the environment for something like Aubrey LaHaye’s murder to happen. And I grew up absolutely unaware that the rest of the world was any different.”

  Fontenot credits her writing style and love for nonfiction storytelling to influential professors she had during her time as an LSU student. She said the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College granted her freedom to get this project off the ground with mentorship. She said she worked with Wheeler closely on the earliest drafts and he helped guide her through the process of creating a book proposal.

  “It was invaluable,” Fontenot said. “The journey of getting this book to print lasted far beyond my time at LSU, but without that foundation, guidance, and encouragement so early on, I don’t believe I’d have a book today.”

  Following its April 2025 release, “Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie” became a national bestseller. Fontenot credits Louisiana readers for the book’s success

  “I was driving when I got the news and had to pull over to have a little freak out,” Fontenot said. “I will say that, while the book has been doing well nationwide—Louisiana is who made this book a bestseller. The enthusiasm of readers and booksellers here has been such an enormous gift.”

  Fontenot said she gained valuable insight into the creative writing and publishing processes while working on the book and offered advice to others with similar writing goals, especially to LSU students.

  “I would just say to take advantage of the resources at your fingertips—the luxury of time dedicated to a single project, the access to experts and professionals who are eager to help you,” Fontenot said. “Don’t waste it!”

  In addition to her book, Fontenot works as a professional editor and writer, as well as a managing editor of “County Roads” magazine. She joined the magazine six months after she graduated from LSU in 2018.

  “It was a direct result of a story that I completed through Professor Wheeler’s Introduction to Immersion Journalism Honors course,” Fontenot said. “So, even beyond the book, LSU and the Honors College have played a significant role in my career—in a field where it can be difficult to find steady work. And for that, I am eternally grateful!”

  Looking to the future, Fontenot is in the early stages of an essay collection, as well as learning how to write for fun again after working on “Home of the Happy” for eight years.

  “I do see another book in the future—hopefully a few,” Fontenot said.

  Next Steps
  Let LSU put you on a path to success! With 330+ undergraduate programs, 70 master's programs, and over 50 doctoral programs, we have a degree for you.

LaHaye Fontenot, Jordan HOME OF THE HAPPY Mariner Books (NonFiction None) $32.50 4, 1 ISBN: 9780063257962

A young writer dives deep in an attempt to solve a cold case in her hometown.

One early morning in 1983, LaHaye Fontenot's great-grandfather Aubrey--a retired bank president, "handshake businessman," and civic leader in Mamou, Louisiana--was kidnapped from his home. Ten days later he was found dead in nearby Bayou Nezpique, bruised and muddy. For those 10 days, the LaHaye family compound was central command for local officials and FBI agents working a case on scant, fuzzy details provided by MawMaw Emily, the author's great-grandmother. Aubrey's murder and the search for his killer redefined a prominent family whose own history was deeply enmeshed in a changing Acadiana town. Even after a conviction, the family's presumption of safety, even untouchability, was jarred; the incident sparked a string of tragedies and losses and became a loaded family myth shrouded in mystery and secret suspicions. Donning the mantle of an investigative reporter with decades more experience, LaHaye Fontenot resolves to put an end to familial silence, whispered theories, and unfollowed leads. Unnerved by the persistent claim of innocence from the man imprisoned for Aubrey's murder, the author claws through official records and mines the long-closeted memories of generations of relatives. It is a bold move to anchor a debut work in raising questions about one's own family history and small-town justice system, but LaHaye Fontenot's pursuit is marked by judicious research, her honest, if complicated, effort at impartiality, and rhapsodic details that honor her home and heritage. From her macabre opening scene through the exhaustion of her material and the various problems of legal and social practice that intersect with her project, she confronts both her family's grand legacy and the challenges of finding true resolution in nonfiction.

A vivid, unflinching, and suspenseful true-crime story from a soulful new voice.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"LaHaye Fontenot, Jordan: HOME OF THE HAPPY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325440/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5c8aafb5. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie. By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot. Apr. 2025. 336p. Mariner, $32.50 (9780063257962). 364.

The LaHaye family has dwelled in their small Louisiana parish for centuries. Their patriarch, Aubrey LaHaye, was a beacon for the community: beloved, kind, and one of Evangeline Parish's most well-respected businessmen. In the winter of 1983, his kidnapping and eventual murder drew national attention. This became a turning point in the family's history, a catalyst for the tragedies to come. LaHaye Fontenot reaches into that darkness to try and find the truth of why her great-grandfather was killed--and whether the man convicted as his murderer has been unjustly blamed for decades. This is a tense, sprawling story, marked by the gaps in information and memory that LaHaye Fontenot seeks to fill. Her writing is urgent and sharp, able to illustrate her family's dynasty without veering into sentimentality. The tight-knit Cajun community of the parish is a vital character in and of itself. LaHaye Fontenot's search for closure shows the limits of the justice system and how families move forward despite its failings.--Zeja Z. Copes

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Copes, Zeja Z. "Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847029992/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec8fa289. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.