Bad Kid (a Graphic Memoir) My Life As a "Troubled Teen"

By: Sofia Szamosi

Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2026-03-10

A searing personal account of the so-called troubled teen industry, this graphic memoir exposes and humanizes the harrowing experience of so many young people in behavioral correction facilities.



When she was just thirteen years old, Sofia was taken--by two people she had never seen before--to a "therapeutic wilderness program" three states away. Her own mother, terrified that Sofia was spiraling out of control, had enrolled her in an institution for "troubled teens." But instead of finding healing, Sofia found herself trapped. Trapped inside an unregulated industry that used promises of intervention and reform to prey upon panicking parents and kids with court orders.



Over the next two years, Sofia would cycle through four different residential programs. In these places, school hours were a privilege, not a right. Contact with the outside world, including her mother, was strictly monitored. Teenage inmates were encouraged to call one another out. Still a child--ripped from her home, stripped of basic freedoms, and severed from her family and friends--Sofia struggled to understand who she really was beneath the crushing weight of the label BAD KID.



A darkly funny and intimate coming-of-age tale, this graphic memoir exposes the harrowing realities of adolescence in and out of the "troubled teen" industry of the early 2000s. And in doing so, Bad Kid explores the lasting impact of the labels we're given--and how making art can help transmute them.