Happy Bad
Nolan’s novel is profoundly responsive to an emerging historical circumstance, joining the proliferating ranks of climate fiction like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower ... I find it remarkable how enjoyable this book is. … Some of this comes from the tight, well-paced plot, and some of it comes from careful wordsmithing ... I cannot recall the last work of climate fiction that made the crisis feel quite so imminent.
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Nolan is a skillful satirist, and one whose aim is extensive, wickedly funny and true ... Despite finding a whole world of bad out there, Nolan leaves her readers, in the end, feeling maybe just a little bit happy.
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There’s a lot going on in this impressive novel ... Nolan has an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it shows in the sheer (and largely realized!) ambition of this novel as well as in her lyrical writing. At first the style seems at odds with her narrator’s background—years of calamities and migration, with little time for reflection. But it also offers a sign of optimism that Beatrice’s flight will someday pause long enough to take a deep breath and tell her tale.
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