Degrees of Happy by Philippa Werry

Degrees of Happy is a thoughtful and emotionally perceptive YA novel about grief, family and the slow, uneven process of finding one’s footing again. After the death of her younger sister Chloe, fourteen-year-old Tess is forced to face another rupture when her parents move the family away from the city she knows. The house they leave behind is not simply a place, but a vessel for memory, especially the tree in the backyard that remains bound to Chloe in Tess’s mind.

Tess arrives in her parents’ former town resentful, guarded and determined to remain unnoticed. She is used to being capable, bright and high-achieving, but her new life offers a strange opportunity to disappear. At her new public school, with its noise, unpredictability and social complexity, she decides she no longer has to be the polished version of herself others expect. Instead, she chooses sharpness. She keeps people at a distance, lets her grades slip and treats kindness with suspicion.

Werry captures this defensive teenage voice with considerable skill. Tess can be prickly and unfair, and there are moments when her inability to recognise the patience of those around her becomes frustrating. Yet this is also part of the novel’s honesty. Grief does not always make people tender.

The blended family surrounding Tess is one of the book’s great strengths. Her older half-siblings, Isabella and Jonty, complicate her sense of what family might mean in this new place. Jonty, in particular, becomes an important figure, offering Tess connection without forcing confession. Through him, and through his wider family life, Tess begins to understand that every household carries its own private arrangements, loyalties and vulnerabilities. Werry avoids tidy sentiment here, presenting family as negotiated rather than inherited.

The school scenes are especially convincing. Teachers and students notice more than Tess expects, and Werry has a strong ear for the way classrooms operate as both public and private spaces. Miss Hobson, who draws Tess into a Shakespeare Festival group almost against her will, is a finely judged presence: persistent, perceptive and recognisable without becoming a caricature. The drama group gives the novel its central movement, as Tess finds herself drawn into a collective task that asks something of her beyond self-protection.

The use of Shakespeare is handled with warmth and intelligence. Through the group’s work on Macbeth, and Tess’s wider reading of the plays, Werry shows how literature can give shape to feelings that are otherwise difficult to name. The Shakespeare Festival setting also allows the novel to explore inclusion and cultural adaptation within contemporary school life. The students’ decision to reimagine their scene through a Pacific lens is thoughtfully presented, including the need for guidance, respect and collaboration rather than casual appropriation.

If the novel occasionally holds the reader at a slight distance, this is largely because Tess herself is still learning how to speak honestly about what has happened to her. The first-person narration limits what can be fully seen, but it also keeps the reader close to the confusion of grief, where understanding often arrives late.

Degrees of Happy is a welcome addition to New Zealand YA fiction. It is not driven by romance, spectacle or easy resolution, but by the quieter drama of a young person learning that she can be changed by loss without being entirely defined by it. Measured, humane and deeply attentive to the lives of teenagers, it confirms Werry’s gift for writing fiction that respects young readers and the complexity of their emotional worlds.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Ahoy