If you were terminally ill, what would you do with your last months? For our main character Hester, the answer is going on a road trip to kill her father.

I was hooked by the concept. I love a story of female rage and revenge. I was intrigued at the beginning of this novel by our main character, her motivations, and her interactions with other characters, but my intrigue waned through the first half. I wanted to know more about why Hester wanted to kill her father, and I felt we didn’t really get to see their relationship and her memories of childhood until halfway through. I appreciated the ending and was overall satisfied with the read, but I wanted more of the why throughout. 3.5

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not totally sure that I actually liked this book, nor am I sure if I didn't like it. There were some parts that were very intriguing and kept my attention and there were some parts that I was bored to death by. The jumping from present to past was compelling and Hester was a well-developed character, but there was something off about the whole story. It felt like the Odyssey in some ways, and in other ways, it read like a William S. Burroughs fever dream. I suppose those are both good things, but again, I'm not really sure what to think.

The ending was great. A total culmination of all the goals of Hester and her journey and a complete cliffhanger. I loved that. I do wish that there was some more resolution between Hester and John, but I liked the whole image of John's life in Hester's mind at the end. That worked for me. It's an interesting book, to say the least. Some good philosophical conversations are sure to be had. That's all good in my book.

Exceedingly compelling. Courage does a great job of creating an unlikeable character that I still care deeply about. I would enjoy having more Hester and John stories.

I wish this novel were coming out sooner—ten months between ARC and publication seem excessive—because I'm already excited for friends to read it. BAD NATURE is a propulsive read. Its shock-jock premise could easily have fizzled out over its 300-page length, but Courage keeps intrigue going through the very end, letting various vignettes along the way settle uneasily as she takes us there. The book offers few easy resolutions—perhaps thankfully, given how quickly that can become hamfisted in environmental literature—but rewards readers with its ambiguities. Despite its humor, it takes itself seriously; despite taking itself seriously, it risks sentimentality only when it's sure it earns it.

BAD NATURE will almost certainly beget comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh's MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION (MYRR). Some of these comparisons will be superficial: Moshfegh hardly has a patent on morally ambiguous, darkly funny, rich white women narrators. And yet so much of the book is indebted to Moshfegh's. As with MYRR, the storytelling makes frequent use of analepsis. The cast of characters is almost the same: in addition to Hester's similarities to MYRR's narrator, the other characters find rather obvious parallels: loony doctors, shitty ex-boyfriends, thorn-in-the-side companions, traumatizing parent(s). By some horseshoe reasoning, even the settings, though complete opposites—the road novel v. an apartment novel—seem similar.

It isn't unusual for a debut novel to wear its influences so obviously on its sleeve, but it feels strange, at best, for its influence to be so clearly another contemporary writer, one from the same generation, one whose book hangs so heavily in literary culture, one that's so recent. It feels like Taylor Swift writing Lana Del Rey songs on FOLKLORE/EVERMORE: yeah, she can pull it off (at least sometimes), but why put yourself in this position as an artist? I'm not sure. But BAD NATURE is good enough that maybe readers won't dwell on this question, and certainly, in Courage's next book, one expects that she'll have found her own footing—she clearly has the skill as a storyteller.