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Have a Nice Day


In this sequel to Get Well Soon, Anna Bloom continues along the path of self-understanding.  She has just returned home from a three-week stay in a mental hospital and is struggling to adjust to life outside of its walls.  Although she misses the near magical realism of life inside and the friends she made there, she is terrified of the implications of such feelings and reluctant to ask about the goings on back at the hospital.  Anna desperately craves a return to “normalcy” and shuns being stigmatized as “the crazy girl.”  Unfortunately, her return home immediately precedes the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and she fears that she’s the cause.  Miraculously, Anna’s saga comes to a middle and brings the novel to a close with a bittersweet poignancy that avoids feeling incomplete even though there is clearly more to tell.  In addition, Halpern’s use of first person point of view fosters an intimate connection between the reader and the protagonist that is both the gift and the curse.  Anna is a complex character who shuttles between a pathetically debilitating frailty and a life-affirming burgeoning strength. Unfortunately, her continuous stream of snarky complaints can not only grate on readers’ nerves but also mask the reality that her vitriolic diatribe stems from (and is a coping mechanism for) a legitimate grievance – disguising her intense grief as the melodrama that adults too frequently associate with adolescence.  Moreover, this seemingly vague and shifting malaise periodically escalates to a mania whose cathartic crescendo jars the audience into fathoming that there is truly something profoundly wrong.  Oddly enough, the ubiquitous allusions to literature and pop culture in Anna’s thought life depict her as a denizen of the awkward nerdery that has been popularized as of late and frequently appeals to both adolescents and adults.  In short, Have a Nice Day is the disturbingly endearing book that you don’t want to like, but can’t manage to put down.
  • Have a Nice Day by Julie Halpern
  • Secondary 
  • Feiwel And Friends 
  • 342 pp. 
  • Published 2012 
  • ISBN 978-0-31260660-2 
  • $16.99 
  • Realistic Fiction
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