Oh, I just love an anti-heroine with a one-track mind and a fuck all attitude. Hester is not necessarily someone I would want to spend time with, but she is someone I like reading about.

I really liked this book!
read if you like..... Last wishes, unhealed trauma, finding community.

#NetGalley

Bad Nature by Ariel Courage is a anti-heroine's journey of self-discovery and snark. A compelling yet dark tale. Hester is a very single, very cynical, rich lawyer. She's not even the good kind of lawyer, her practice helps no one but keeping billion dollar corporations powerful and cash-flush. Nothing to tie her down, she is driven by hatred and shielded with botox. When she gets a terminal diagnosis, she completely blows up her life. Quits her job and packs her luxury jaguar with some clothes and her handgun and heads from Manhattan to California to kill her father.

Hester is a self-proclaimed irredeemable a-hole, and seems nearly sociopathic at times. For the majority of the book, she is supremely unlikable, to the point where you aren't even really sorry she has cancer. But she is always compelling. Over the course of the trip you learn about her ex-boyfriend, ex-friends, and the life she had at the firm that shaped who she is. And that no matter how damaged someone is, a mother that loves you unconditionally will always have an imprint on your life.

Painfully well-constructed sentences, a road trip journey with a FOIL that allows for haunting conversation, and settings that span the rust belt, bible belt and everything in-between. I am typically determined for a happy ending, and although you won't find a "Joe Vs the Volcano" redemption arc, there are some satisfying surprises at the end. I promise she doesn't "grow a heart of gold" and no cheese melts in this tale.

Questions you will ask yourself, "What if you had nothing to lose?" "How do you problem solve when you have motivation but no future?" Hester's situation gives her a perspective that allows her to make the most unusual observations that will keep you thinking.

Thanks to @netgalley and @henryholtbooks for the ARC. Book to be released April 1, 2025.

First and Foremost, thank you to Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC for an honest review.

This is a book that is hard for me to place, because I think I liked it, but it was so unrelentingly dour and brutal that it is hard to say how I feel about it. And this is a good thing. Ariel Courage created a character in Hester that is so cynical and pessimistic that it is hard to reside within her mind for the entirety of this book, but at the same time her point of view is fascinating because of that same cynicism and pessimism. Her life of struggling to connect to anyone or anything provides an insight into people that do exist, and people that are so often left to slip through the cracks. Many people like Hester fall into addictions, and for Hester, that addiction appears in the way she interacts with the world and interacts with the people around her. She is so attached to pain and anger, with nothing else to drive her, that she struggles to trust others at all times, which is why her relationship with John becomes such an oddity. I think that this book is well worth a read, even though it may leave you feeling emptied out, because as much as it is a tale of depression, detachment, and grief, it is also a reminder that having hope and faith in others is one of our best ways of fighting back at the systems that oppress us.

I really enjoyed this book and the dark humor within it. I found this book to be very unique and different from other books I have read. The plot is very interesting and I loved the dual timelines. This book is well written and the author did a great job.

This was a very interesting, black comedy type novel that I enjoyed very much. Look forward to more by this author.

What a fantastic premise - I knew I had to read this as soon as I saw the blurb. Hester is a compelling lead and it’s easy to root for her even as her goal is to remain prickly and friendless. She has a dark sense of humor and enjoyed a glimpse of her inner monologue.

The writing is lovely and the pacing is relaxed even though there is a sense of urgency as Hester wants to get to California as soon as possible and as her diagnosis is bleak. Not everything is tied up neatly but there is a satisfying conclusion. Overall, this is a strange (a compliment!) and intriguing read.

Thank you very much to Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

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.