Review: "Bad Kid" by Sofia Szamosi

Bad Kid by Sofia Szamosi
Published March 2026 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

In the early aughts, at the age of 13, Szamosi was dragged out of bed and sent to a wilderness "rehabilitation" program for teenagers. Between then and turning eighteen, she spent two years in such programs...the sort of programs that have more recently gotten quite a bit of press for being ineffective at best and abusive at worst. I've read enough about these programs to say that what Szamosi describes sounds like the milder half of the scale, but...that's partly because the harsher half of the scale is so terrible. Some readers might find some of the themes throughout the book to be a bit much for teenagers, but I think the point here is that this was Szamosi's teenage years...and anyway the worst of it is what was done in the name of "treatment".

The art style is simple but gets the job done. I particularly appreciated the collaged bits included throughout—photos of Szamosi from her teens, snippets of journal entries, the occasional location photo, etc. We're around the same age, and the photos in particular are so evocative of that time period, things that made me think "oh yes, I've known variations of that girl". Photos aside, the illustrations are black and white, with red for emphasis.

Two things I would have liked a bit more of: First, while Szamosi writes her teenaged self with a combination of compassion, wryness, and cringeing (we should all have some teenage moments that we cringe to look back on!), I would have liked a bit more of a sense of direct "looking back". That is...we see that Szamosi can see that she wasn't making a lot of good decisions as a teen, and that she can see now how much her mother was struggling to figure out what to do, how to help her. Most of the actual telling is from the perspective of Szamosi as a teen, though, and I would have loved some more reflection—what does she now think would have been best for her? How much of her teenageness does she now consider concerning, and how much does she think was normal/stuff she'd have grown out of? And second, where did things go after the end of the book? There's a conclusion, but it's a little abrupt, and I can see a number of possible trajectories. Some kind of an afterword might have been nice.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.