Nothing Bad is Going to Happen by Kathleen Hale (HarperTeen, January 2016)

Meet Kippy Bushman—spunky, awkward, intrepid sixteen-year-old detective. Add in one part murder, one part donuts, and three heaping spoonfuls of camp, and you have Kathleen Hale’s hilarious and brilliantly-executed Nothing Bad is Going to Happen (the sequel to her 2014 hit No One Else Can Have You).

In this second book, we find Kippy eagerly heading to her boyfriend’s house, only to find him gasping for breath after what appears to be a suicide attempt. Kippy knows Davey would never kill himself, but she’s the only one in town who suspects foul play. If she wants to bring his almost-killer to justice, she’ll have to do it herself. Though the premise was similar to Hale’s previous book, I still found myself racing through the pages. The twist at the end? I never saw it coming.

If you read this book for no other reason—if young adult isn’t really your groove, or if you get too easily spooked by crime novels—read it for Kippy. Hale’s narrator is so earnest, so unfailingly honest, that you can’t help but root for her as she clumsily navigates adolescence. Don’t believe me? Here’s an excerpt (spoiler-free!) from the beginning of the novel:

I pour over the flash card in my hand, trying to focus. I’m testing myself on sex moves for later. I’ll finally be free of my cast after school, so Davey and I decided that tonight’s the night. (For sex.)

The front of this card says DONUT THINGAMAJIG.

Donut Thingamajig = Eat a donut off your male partner’s penis, or “dick,” as some people like to call it. I read about this move in Cosmopolitan magazine and I was like “Whaaaaa…..?” Cosmo doesn’t exactly say what type of donut to use, but I think it should be the kind with the hole in the middle. That way, the donut hole mimics the vagina, or “cunt,” as McKetta would say. I’ve also decided I’m going to get two donuts in case one doesn’t fit correctly. The bad thing is that I make a lot of crumbs, even when I eat off regular plates, so I will probably make a big mess. Plain donuts will be the easiest to clean up, but they are also, objectively speaking, the worst type of donut.

Kippy is a teenager, plain and simple. She has no idea what she’s doing—both sexually, as in this passage, and in life in general, as in the rest of the book—but gosh dangit if she isn’t going to give it her all. It’s impossible not to love someone who goes after life (and criminals) with such fierce determination… and impossible not to laugh at their blunders along the way.

Aside from Kippy, the key player in this mystery novel-cum-comedy is the setting, the small town of Friendship, Wisconsin. It’s exactly what you would expect from a small town—the midwestern “nice,” the way everyone knows everyone, the regional idiosynchrasies like “dontcha know?” and hotdish potlucks—exaggerated about ten times to make it a character. Here’s something I’ve realized: People from small towns love to read about small towns.

More specifically, people from small towns like to read about small towns done right. We don’t want to be mocked, but at the same time, we love to poke fun at ourselves. Kathleen Hale navigates this territory magnificently. She allows the town to be self-aware of its own ridiculousness, and pokes fun at it only to expose its faults, while still focusing on the heart and community that drives it.

One of my main critiques of this book was going to be, shocker, from a feminist lens. On my first read, this book was disappointingly sexist. At one point, Kippy jokes to her friend Libby that, “We haven’t even passed the Bechdel test!”—and it’s true. Libby has impossibly large breasts, and Kippy looks down on her as the airhead cheerleader. The word “slut” is tossed around without consequence. I was disappointed that a book with such a vibrant, atypical protagonist could disappoint me by barely passing Feminism 101, and then I realized – this book isn’t meant to be a feminist manifesto.

What Kathleen Hale does, and does brilliantly, is represent what feminism and female friendships are like for teenage girls in small towns. They’re not perfect. Not everyone in high school (or anyone, for that matter) has read bell hooks, or knows words like “intersectionality” and “heteronormativity.” The point isn’t that feminism is a binary—either you’re perfect or you’re a misogynist—but that we all start somewhere. (This is also the thesis of the book “Bad Feminist,” by Roxane Gay, if you’re interested.) For a young girl in a small town—picture me, age thirteen, complete with glasses and braces and zits—Kippy Bushman is a misogyny-fighting superhero. And that’s important too.

All in all, I adored this book. I sped through it in a single sitting, alternatively laughing until I cried and hiding beneath the covers at the spine-tingling suspense. Is it perfect? Probably not. But I know one thing:

Kippy Bushman for President, 2036.

What are some of your favorite books with surprising humor?