*Happy Bad* is a brilliant and chaotic road trip novel set in a near-future East Texas, where the world is crumbling under climate destruction and social unrest. Beatrice, a caregiver at an underfunded treatment center for troubled teenage girls, must navigate a brutal heatwave, a massive blackout, and escalating violence as she tries to lead the girls to safety. With sharp humor and a raw, politically charged narrative, this novel is both a poignant exploration of human connection and a fierce critique of societal collapse.

Beatrice is a simultaneously detached and profoundly present. Her internal dialogue is irreverent and comically specific. I LOVE this sort of narrator. I also enjoy coming of age stories, and here we get multiple. I recommend to anyone who enjoys the same.

I loved the premise: in an ecologically bankrupt US in the near future (real), a young woman, Beatrice, who works at a home for girls is tasked with moving them cross-state as the largest environmental crisis yet rages. Also, the girls are going through withdrawal from their pre-FDA approval psych meds. 😅

This story alternates between the world and family of Beatrice’s youth, and those she’s found herself a part of in the present. I think there are some incredibly sad and touching moments tempered by humor.

My chief issues were pacing in the second half, which seemed to start to limp towards the end, and the way that the humor sort of drained away. I could see that being intentional, it just didn’t feel that way to me. I also felt that the book ended abruptly.

I still really enjoyed this and am happy I got a chance to read it. The references to Eastern North Carolina really tugged at my heartstrings since that’s where I spent my childhood.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Astra Publishing House for the eARC.

Delaney Nolan’s Happy Bad is a haunting and lyrical debut that burrows into the psychic landscape of a young woman grappling with trauma, self-destruction, and fleeting moments of tenderness. Set against the sun-bleached decay of the American South, the novel leans into an atmosphere of emotional rawness, where desire, violence, and survival twist together like tangled roots.

At the heart of the story is our unnamed narrator, a young woman fresh out of prison, wandering through a world that offers her little redemption or structure. Her internal monologue—fragmented, poetic, and at times brutally honest—draws readers into a disorienting headspace shaped by cycles of abuse, addiction, and alienation. The narrative is non-linear and impressionistic, more interested in sensation and emotional texture than plot mechanics, echoing the works of writers like Denis Johnson or Jenny Offill.

Nolan’s prose is what elevates Happy Bad beyond its grim subject matter. Her language is sharp, intimate, and visceral, capable of swerving from stark realism to aching beauty within a single paragraph. Every line feels deliberate, heavy with implication, yet light enough to float—much like the narrator herself, drifting between connection and isolation.

The novel’s strength lies in its refusal to moralize or neatly resolve its conflicts. Nolan instead opts to render her protagonist’s world in unflinching clarity, where love is both a salve and a wound, and healing is never guaranteed. While this ambiguity may frustrate some readers looking for narrative closure, it resonates as a deeply honest portrayal of a fractured life.

Happy Bad is a compact, brutal, and beautiful novel that lingers long after the final page. Delaney Nolan has crafted a voice that feels urgent and necessary—an aching howl into the silence of forgotten lives.

I really enjoyed this novel. I enjoy novels where the narrative is internal dialog. It makes you feel like you are that person, at that moment in time. This was a dark story at times but very interesting and kept me enraptured. Look forward to more by this author.

Thanks to Netgalley and Astra House for the ebook. Set slightly in the future, Beatrice works at a center for troubled teenage girls whose behavior has been vastly improved by the taking of a new drug that is doing a clinical trial at this facility. Or at least that’s what Beatrice puts in all her reports. The drugs don’t really seem to help, but she desperately wants the girls and the staff to be transferred to a new facility in Atlanta. Where they currently are, in East Texas, is quickly becoming a climate disaster area, with extreme heat, historic dust storms and ever growing blackouts. The heart of the novel is a road trip across the country with all these fragile characters that is hysterical when it’s not horrific and life threatening.

This book will keep you on the edge of your seat. It's always nice reading a novel by a debut author and this one was great! It's weird in the best way and very well-written. You will have a lot of empathy for these characters as you read this book and begin to know their story.

Wow! Delaney Nolan has created possibly the bleakest, most dystopian world I've encountered in literature - a terrifyingly believable future America where unchecked capitalism, climate devastation, unethical drug trials, underfunded public systems, dangerous cults, police violence, border militarization, excessive bureaucracy, supply chain issues, extreme wealth inequality, and anti-migrant sentiment have created a hostile wasteland that will make you miss the days of Katniss Everdeen fighting to the death in the Hunger Games. The America of <i>Happy Bad</i> is a devasted hellhole stripped of any hope, where most animals are extinct, a failing electrical grid battles with record high temperatures, the landscape is a greenless dust bowl, food is made with "imitation corn," and our protagonist struggles to maintain a semblance of sanity working in a psych facility/prison for "troubled" teenage girls, who are used as human guinea pigs for a private pharmaceutical company. Other reviews have compared this novel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I think that is apt; it also reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books, The Grapes of Wrath. It's not until the very last few pages that we get a glimmer of hope for our characters to eke out some semblance of a better life. The heaviness of this book definitely required me to take mental health breaks while reading, but I'm glad I stuck it out. The worldbuilding and pacing of this novel are excellent, and while I didn't necessarily like the main character, she was interesting and complex. If I had one critique it would be that the ending was a little abrupt and left me with questions that could maybe be answered in a sequel? eh? As challenging as it was, Nolan has introduced us to a deeply compelling world, and I could definitely see a sort of anthology series of books set in this universe but with different characters and locations. For instance, I want to know more about the weird parallel-universe cult that Beatrice's parents joined, and I want to see what life is like for the elite of this world, who presumably are lounging about in an air-conditioned bunker, or maybe they flew to Mars with Elon? At any rate, this book is worth facing the hopelessness in order to confront the issues Nolan is raising, and she is definitely an author I'll be watching for in the future.

Much like a dose of BeZen, I was hooked from my first taste of page one. I loved our narrator, in all her messy glory, and every other character too. The world building was scary and sadly believable, with a plot that kept me so engaged I stayed up way too late trying to read as much as I could before sleep won out.

The writing is sometimes so beautiful, I’d re-read sentences just for the pleasure of it. But the tone is also irreverent, and that juxtaposition works so well for this story.

Fans of Laura van den Berg absolutely must check out Happy Bad. I’m already waiting for whatever Nolan decides to write next.

This was a fun read and also very dark at times! I have always had a weird fascination with apocalyptic stories and I enjoyed the combination of that with a girls group home, as I also always have loved books and movies that remind me of Heathers or Girl, Interrupted, which this did! Totally up my alley and I’ll be recommending this!