Tender

December 14, 2015
At first glance, McKeon’s second work of fiction (after Irish Book of the Year–winner Solace) explores well-trod themes. Two college-aged youngsters in Dublin meet through mutual acquaintances, develop a friendship, and experience much elation and angst over the course of a year together in the late 1990s. But as the raw and claustrophobic story progresses, it becomes devastatingly clear that the path their relationship is taking is far from ordinary. For one, budding photographer James is gay and closeted, during a time when homosexuality isn’t widely accepted in Ireland. His anguish and frustration at not being able to love freely is deftly handled by McKeon, who mostly relies on what isn’t said to lend weight to his predicament. Instead, what propels the plot forward is the sheer force of Catherine’s blind love for James. She wants all of him, first emotionally, and then physically—a wrinkle that adds depth to the friends’ tragic coupling and makes their breaking apart so easy to predict and so heartbreaking to read. Catherine’s self-destructive obsession with James may verge on maddening for readers (though the author’s choice to saddle her with an interest in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, written about Sylvia Plath and published in 1998, was a smart one). But the book’s final chapters, detailing the older and wiser friends’ bittersweet reunion in New York 14 years later, proves that time does heal the heart’s deepest wounds—or, as McKeon so aptly demonstrates, at least most of them.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
In McKeon's exquisite second novel, two Dublin young people--poet and student Catherine and aspiring art photographer James--tumble into a friendship that, though its lines shift and blur, ultimately helps bring their identities into focus. From almost the first moment they meet, Catherine and James are inseparable. They talk on the phone for hours and write long letters to each other when they're apart, walk arm in arm, and share a special common language when they're together. Although Catherine, still adjusting to life at university and away from her rural childhood home, is studying art history and English, James, who also grew up outside the city and is just back from a stint working as an assistant to a well-known photographer in Berlin, seems (to her, at least) to know far more about, well, everything than she. With James, Catherine learns to be bold and take risks--intellectual, emotional, physical. James, too, finds a path to himself and to his future. But as their relationship, tracked over the course of a little more than a year, in 1997-'98, becomes increasingly complex and weightier and takes on new dimensions, it begins to fracture. McKeon, whose debut novel, Solace, won the 2011 Faber Prize and was voted the Irish Book of the Year, captures something essential about friendship, vulnerability, love, and longing. As it explores the push-pull of this achingly intimate, increasingly obsessive relationship--the way James and Catherine attract and repel each other as if they were two strong magnets turned this way and that--the story throbs with the tension between them. This is youth; this is yearning. These are the lessons we learn about desire and disappointment, discovered strengths and regrettable weaknesses--and how to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we made when we did not yet know how to keep ourselves from making them. McKeon regards the characters in her keenly wrought love story--for all their flaws and fragility--with insight, sensitivity, and a compassion that proves contagious.

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Starred review from February 1, 2016
It all starts out innocently enough. Catherine, home from university in Dublin, protests to her parents that James, the young man with whom she was seen sharing headphones on the train platform, is not her boyfriend. But who is he, this man with the quick wit and the unruly red hair and the dark fits of melancholy, this man with whom she can talk for hours about everything and nothing, this man who is both hers and not hers? It's complicated. And as Catherine's life begins to open upshe's writing poetry, becoming a journalist, and going to raucous lit-scene partiesher heart remains intimately intertwined with James, even after it becomes clear that she cannot offer him what he needs. Somewhere in the background, the Celtic Tiger of the late 1990s is roaring along, bringing with it social change. But all we care about is Catherine and James and the electric moments between them. McKeon follows her much-praised debut (Solace, 2011) with a fever dream of friendship, love, and obsession that is as emotionally raw as it is artfully crafted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2015

McKeon, whose debut, Solace, was voted Irish Book of the Year in 2012, presents a new novel set in late 1990s Dublin, where unworldly college student Catherine and daring, dashing artist James become best friends. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016

In 1997, when Catherine Reilly and James Flynn meet in Dublin, she is gravitating toward arts journalism and he is pursuing dreams of becoming a world-class photographer. Their friendship is extraordinary for its intimacy, and though early in their acquaintance James sets limits on how close they'll get, Catherine falls in love with him. As they navigate the increasingly precarious boundaries of their relationship, Catherine's obsession with James ultimately destroys what they have. Sadder but wiser, they reconcile to an extent in 2012, with Catherine's youthful passion for James credited and redeemed. VERDICT With the mastery of Anne Enright--and the influence of Maeve Binchy and Edna O'Brien also evident--McKeon delivers a heartfelt and tragic second novel (after Solace). The subtle narrative pacing and deep descriptions of both Dublin and the characters and their distinctive habits believably convey the often heartbreaking initiations of young adulthood. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.