*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!

this book is a heatstroke hallucination. a dust-choked, blood-blistered, wrenching trip through a crumbling texas, powered by failed systems and girls on unregulated psych meds. and god, i loved it.

the writing is phenomenal. not flashy, not self-congratulatory, just piercing. the kind of prose that slides a knife between your ribs without warning. there's a moment where someone's chewing "a tassel of her own hair," and it tells you more about the tone than anything else i could write. (side note: i laughed out loud when the protag tells us that if someone ever says that money doesn't matter, we should steal their wallet.)

this book's world feels terrifyingly real: climate collapse, privatized healthcare, pharma corruption, capital-run bureaucracy. our protagonist gets vouchers to pay for a moving van and they aren't accepted. cash-only because the government can't be trusted to take care of its citizens and keep its promises.

beatrice, our narrator, is a brilliant contradiction: emotionally numbed out and yet painfully perceptive. there's a throughline here about loyalty and detachment, about what happens to a person who's asked to care in a world that keeps proving it doesn't care back. and also? she's from eastern north carolina. loved seeing that detail woven in since i'm also from there. and having been impacted by devastating hurricanes (florence, my family lost homes in helene), the environmental aspects of this feel less like sci-fi and more like our pending reality.

i do wish we'd spent more time in the "after". i wanted to see the post-blackout pockets of community, especially that glimpse of louisiana. and i think the book could've gone even deeper on the bezen pharma angle. i wanted more bite, more conspiracy, more horror in the way institutional rot gets papered over. but honestly? i didn't want this book to end at all, so this criticism is rooted in my own greed for more.

not for the faint of heart. or maybe especially for the faint of heart. either way, it's incredible. a novel for the ones who see the heat shimmer and know it's a warning. happy bad is blistered and brilliant.

This book was so much fun, kinda like girl interrupted meets the apocalypse. Reading this also made me aware of the dangers we could face one day and that was unsettling in a great way. Thank you for this book, it was great!

Beatrice is 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 approved 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.

8 likes

intense and interesting. our narrator is hilariously specific, and the timejumps lock in the plot really well. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

This book was dark, heavy, and fun.
Girl, Interrupted and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets the apocalypse and political upheaval. There were so many themes worked in and well-balanced.

"Angry young women are the most goddamned resourceful people on the planet."

For an apocalyptic narrative, this was so, so funny that I kept giggling throughout. The characters are, to put it euphemistically, spirited, lively, and creative when it comes to problem-solving. I found them endearing in their ungovernability. As for their minder, she really has her work cut out for her but she miraculously manages to stay above it somehow and stay optimistic even when she's getting battered or endlessly cleaning up bodily fluids.

Beatrice works in a facility called Twin Bridge that is supposed to rehabilitate girls who are considered out of control, either by their parents or by the state. It is often mistaken for a girls' prison and for good reason. The girls there are a mixed bag—some believe in witchcraft, some are a risk to themselves. A lesser person might have despaired and quit long ago, but Beatrice genuinely cares for the girls, even when the experimental mood-stabilising drugs don't work or run out. Beatrice's own unconventional (read: traumatic) childhood provides insight into why she is so suited for the job. Takes a damaged girl to know another, right?

In the background, the world has been slowly going to shit but the shitshow is accelerating by the hour. I liked that the story showed very clearly how it wasn't just the climate getting wacky on its own but that unethical corporations and incompetent (militant) governments have a strong hand in making it hard for everyone who is just trying to survive. Beatrice gets a chance to relocate everyone to a better location but she has no money, no manpower, and the world is literally on fire. But she tries, she really does, and we love to see it. Very entertaining with a lot of heart. I'd watch the film adaptation.

Since I skim read blurb and tend to pick books by cover I rarely really know what a book will be about. So Happy Bad was a lot more dystopian than I'd like but there's a generous helping of hope in there too.

Our protagonist, Beatrice, comes from a bizarre background - parents abandoned her and her sister, Jemma, then she (in turn) left Jemma, eventually ending up in Edenton working in a girl's group home.

At the time we join the book Beatrice has the girls on a new drug - BeZen - which has wrought miraculous changes on troubled teens. With that in mind Beatrice has "tweaked" the results (quite a lot as it turns out) in order to get her girls moved from a facility in the middle of what is rapidly becoming an unliveable state to a shiny new home in Atlanta. But the climate has other ideas and what should have been a routine road trip turns into an, often comedic, race to find somewhere safe for the girls.

I certainly enjoyed this book more than I usually do a dystopian novel but Beatrice, the other staff and (especially) the girls are extremely likeable characters.

This is not a political novel. It is a look at one version of what the USA might become if global warming continues. But, as I say, its not all doom and gloom. The characters make it worth the read. Its also a look at the increasing problems of drug (ab)use to control behaviour.

There are no big sticks though. Noone is picked on. It is simply a human story about survival, resilience and finding joy wherever you can.

Recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley and Astra Publishing for the advance review copy.

What a stellar debut! Part dystopian, part literary fiction, full of humor and heart. It's timely and smart, I am a huge fan of this.

While it started out a bit slow, I think the build up was at a decent pace and that it made the characters more endearing. As a semi-troubled teen myself, this story was pretty cute and sweet. I like that the protagonist develops more as the story goes on and we learn more about her own story in relation to the girls' stories. I also enjoyed the interesting take on climate change and how it might alter the future, with different slips being assigned to be able to move state to state. Overall, this is not a story I would normally go for but I did enjoy it and found it heartwarming.

My only critique is that the Kindle version needs some work. A lot of the phrases or even multiple sentences are grouped together without spacing and I highlighted several of them, but eventually gave up. Of course, I can still read them this way, but it is somewhat irritating solely because I read to wind down for the night and having to break 7-10+ words up to make sense logically is not conducive to my mental break, which is why I will give it 4 stars.
I did enjoy the content overall though, it is just the need for some format editing :)

This debut is completely off the rails. A dystopian novel that is very bleak (natch), but is so over the top that it’s almost bearable? Funny at times? Really powerful and creative.

This is a brilliant romp that sings in the face of ecological fallout. The author has managed to home in on the theme of denial, and how crises grow until they take over the story (or our stories) completely. I thoroughly enjoyed both plot lines in parallel – the narrator’s upbringing, and her time working at a Tender Kare girl’s facility. While everyone seems to be looking for alternatives to the bleak future set in the novel, our narrator has no other choice but to confront chaos head on. In turn, she is an incredibly enjoyable character to read – defined by her grit and sense of humor. The book felt raw in a way that was refreshing, and hit on a darker side of adolescence. I am excited for everyone who finds this new release!

Thank you to NetGalley and Astra House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

I reallyyy liked this novel!! I found it fascinating and eerily believable of a dystopian future America. 😅

Although the story is set in a bleak, apocalyptic world, it’s surprisingly funny. I caught myself giggling, especially in the first half, despite the dark themes.

The story follows Beatrice, who works at a facility in Askewn, Texas. This is a center for girls deemed unmanageable, and let me tell ya, the girls are indeed an interesting and unpredictable bunch. At Twin Brduge, they’re given BeZen, a mood stabilizing drug in the final stages of FDA approval.

Meanwhile, the world is falling apart under climate disasters. When BeZen offers Beatrice a chance to relocate the girls (and herself) to a better facility, and a heat wave triggers a massive blackout, the journey that follows is anything but simple. What a journey!

I found the characters, from the girls to Beatrice and the other supervisors at the facility, both chaotic and unique. There is dystopian, climate change, corporate greed and corruption, incompetence (aham government), drug use, coming of age. I appreciated how the novel alternated between present and past timelines.

This is a human story about survival, and to an extent I think, joy. I could see this as a film adaption! It’s eerie but hopeful, sad but strangely uplifting.

All of the characters who make an appearance in this level are incredibly interesting and have their own set of problems, but as a narrator, Beatrice interests me a lot. She has a complicated past that she often falls back into in moments of stress and it is through these flashbacks that we see how the flimsy scaffolding that held people's lives together fell apart as it was pummeled by Cat 5 hurricanes and intense drought. The way that these moments slip in and out of focus, as Beatrice herself does, may make The narrative a little bit harder to follow for some readers who have difficulty following timelines if they aren't chronological or clearly demarcated. However, these slips and time add a unique sense of urgency to the presence somehow in a way that I don't think I've seen in a while.

In its dystopian setting, Happy Bad manages to somehow be terribly dreary and claustrophobic, but also extremely hopeful at the same time. People find a way to move ahead, and though it might not necessarily be the "right" way, it's progress to a better future all the same. this becomes especially apparent when comparing and contrasting Beatrice and the other adults looking after the troubled girls, and the troubled girls themselves.

These girls are in this facility for many reasons and just like now, a lot of those reasons are more the fault of the system than any individual action. Regardless of why though, it's apparent that the girls are incredibly unstable. This is further emphasized by the fact that they're currently participating in a drug trial for a medication called BeZen which numbs all of the emotions that they're feeling. It would take a lot more time and spoilers for me to tease this out more, but it brings to mind the arrogance of humanity to assume that it's possible to truly control any part of our lives, especially when it comes to the Earth.

I tend to write these reviews more or less immediately after I finish the book. I don't stop to think about the book for several days or write down some kind of deep analysis. I share my first thoughts. And my first thoughts when it comes to Happy Bad are this: Life is tough and we face a lot of challenges. The climate is changing rapidly and radically around us, political systems are swinging towards a very public dehumanization of anybody who is deemed unfit (POC, those with disabilities, LGBTQ+, etc.). Yet in this dystopian little novel, there remains hope and a reminder of the power of human kindness.

Times are tough, but we're far stronger together than we are apart. And it's not always easy to work together, but it's worth it. Happy Bad feels better sweet, but it's worth it. And much like Beatrice and her coworkers and the girls she helps look after, we are all worth it too.

Happy Bad by Delaney Nolan is a compelling and urgent debut that blends climate-futurism, institutional collapse, and human resilience into one searing narrative. Set in a near-future Texas gripped by heat waves, blackouts, and social breakdown, the story follows Beatrice Campbell—a coordinator at a beleaguered girls’ residential treatment center—as she navigates evacuation, drug trials, and her own fractured past. Nolan’s prose is both sharp and evocative (“psycho Easter palette” looms large), and the novel manages to be both bleak and unexpectedly hopeful in the way it honors the provisional, fragile nature of community.

If you like smart, intense fiction that asks how we live when the foundations start to give way, this is one to read.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the book preview. This is a dystopian novel dealing with girlhood, climate crises, and the consequences of our actions as a society. I enjoyed the preview and found it to be relevant to the current climate, both political and environmental.

The horrors that our characters face throughout this book could absolutely become reality within our existence and I really believe that is what kept my eyes glued to each page of Delaney Nolan's debut novel, set in the dystopian realms of a devastating, ecological nightmare! 🥲

Gripped by the catastrophic uncertainty of their journey and Beatrice's compassion towards the girls, I really enjoyed how the non-linear narrative added that extra layer of curiosity to the book! I was captivated after the first few chapters and couldn't put the book down (which is rare for a mood reader like myself) so if you're looking for that immersive and engaging read that will really make you think twice about the future of our world— look no further! 👀

Thank you Astra Publishing House & NetGalley for access to this ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts of the book!

Our narrator, Beatrice, works at a treatment centre for challenging teenage girls. This is the near-future, where climate change is causing devastating heat-waves and other environmental issues.
After an extended powercut she is forced to evacuate the girls along with other staff members and embark on a challenging road trip.
Our narrator is entertaining, and there was a satirical tone running through the narrative, which occasionally made me chuckle.
I enjoyed all the interactions with the girls, and it was a different feeling kind of climate crisis book which felt refreshing.
I was disappointed at the sudden ending, but it was overall an assured debut novel.