You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here

April 13, 2020
Macken debuts with an overfull take on female friendship and the frustrations of early adulthood. Katie Devane grows up in rural Glenbruff, Ireland, with Evelyn, her self-centered best friend, and Katie’s needy adopted cousin, Maeve. At 16, in the 1990s, Katie and Evelyn fantasize of fleeing the depressed town to become great artists, but things change when new classmate Pamela Cooney arrives from Dublin as part of the country’s rural resettlement program. Pamela shows off fresh hip-hop dance moves and looks to Katie “like a doll fresh out of a box.” After Pamela’s unexplained disappearance, the girls continue to rue the attention paid to her. Macken’s narrative skips quickly through time, with Katie leaving for college in Dublin, then graduating and working in advertising. After she burns out at a hyper-stressful agency, Katie returns home in her 20s to a mercurial Evelyn and a newly assured Maeve. A surprise announcement from Evelyn about her film project makes Katie immensely jealous and pushes her into deeper self-doubt about her own aspirations to work in film. Macken’s downplaying of major events, such as Pamela’s disappearance and Katie’s college years, resonates with the solipsism of youth, but can make story lines seem undeveloped. Still, Macken gets a lot of mileage from Katie’s beguiling voice and sardonic humor. In the end, this is too scattershot to make an impact.

November 1, 2020

Gr 9 Up-Katie, Evelyn, and Maeve have been friends since childhood in a small, sleepy Irish town. They ramble through hot endless summers, dreaming up plans for the future. Evelyn, elegant and rich, is always the leader; homely Maeve, the loser; while Katie floats in the middle. It seems life will never change, until Pamela moves to town and the girls waver between friendship and jealousy. Pamela disappears one day, but after months of searching the case is abandoned. Though life seems to go back to normal for the girls, something has changed, and there is a new tension in their relationship. Narrator Katie subtly draws herself as the more moral and courageous of the girls, but reality does not always bear this out. Macken writes with great insight into the psyches of the girls and their complicated relationship. Small town life is shown with all its hidden anger and jealousies; some petty and small, others cumulative and leading to much greater expressions-perhaps even murder. The characters' races are not specified. VERDICT This evocative, tense, and poignant coming-of-age story will grip readers with its hard dose of reality. Give this to fans of Amy Zhang's This is Where the World Ends and Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends.-Gretchen Crowley, formerly at Alexandria City P.L., VA

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