author interview: Polly Atkin

Posted on February 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of The Company of Owls, here’s Polly Atkin: The Art of Noticing.

Polly Atkin lives in Grasmere, in the English Lake District, and is co-owner of the historic independent bookshop Sam Read Bookseller. She writes poetry (Basic Nest Architecture; Much with Body) and nonfiction (Recovering Dorothy; Some of Us Just Fall). She writes and talks about living with chronic illness, disability and the environment, living in a rural place, and, as a disabled person, access to nature and to the arts. In The Company of Owls (Milkweed; reviewed in this issue), she considers solitude, companionship, and the natural world through the lens of some very special neighbors.

Were you always drawn to owls?

Yes! I am a child of the ’80s, so I grew up with lots of fictional owls, like the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans who I absolutely adored. We had owls that would call from these very large, old trees where I grew up, although I didn’t see them often. Athena’s owl was the symbol of my school when I was seven, and we got a little badge with a stylized owl face on it. They were a presence in my life.

At what point in your owl observations did you realize you were working on a book?

Very late on. The book became a book through amazing happenstance. It was one of those beautiful coincidences that can only happen when you’ve been in an industry for a while.

There are poems about owls in all of my collections, so I’ve been writing about owls for a long time. My agent Caro [Clarke] was at the London Book Fair the year after my book Some of Us Just Fall came out, at the next table to Sarah Rigby, the editor at Elliott & Thompson. Sarah came back from a break saying, “I heard someone talking about buying a book called The Solitude of Owls, and I’m really jealous. I wish I’d bought that book!” And eventually they realized she’d misheard, and that book didn’t exist at all. But Caro thought about my owls and said, actually, I think I could get you that book if you want it.

So I had this amazing e-mail from Caro saying, listen, you know those owls you’ve been writing poems about, would you write a book about them? I said, YES! Yes please! Nothing like that has ever happened in my writing life before, that someone’s said, here, I’ll give you a chunk of money to write about that thing you’re already writing about.

None of us have any idea what she’d misheard in the first place.

As a writer of both poetry and prose, is it always clear which is called for?

I write my prose in a similar way to how I write poetry. I think very hard about every word. That sounds patronizing, like obviously other writers don’t! But the rhythm and the syntax is as important to me in prose as it is in poetry. I have to wait for the right way to say something. For everything I write, 90% of the time is thinking and percolating time, and 10% is the actual writing down. It’s very voice driven.

A poem is much more open. You can leave things dangling; the white space makes a lot of the meaning. I used to say to students: so much of the poem is what the reader brings to it. It’s a drink that you need to dilute. The poem is a really concentrated flavor, and the reader brings the water that makes it drinkable. All of that happens in space on the page, and how those images and metaphors move from person to person. This happens with prose as well, but in a different, more truncated way.

How does poetry influence your prose?

So much of poetry is about attention to what’s around us. Williams Wordsworth says poetry is about having a watchful heart and a keen eye and ear. You’re listening and observing what’s around you, but you’re also seeing beyond that. In The Prelude, he says poets and prophets are similar because they both see the unseen. That art of noticing is at the core of both poetry and prose for me.

The art of questioning too. The prose I’m interested in is open: it asks questions, raises ideas, and doesn’t necessarily tell you an answer. Writing is a moving toward understanding. That’s why I do it, and I’m trying to communicate that to other people, but I have to learn something too or it seems dead to me, kind of flat. That fundamental underlay of what’s happening with poetry is always happening for me with prose as well.

How has owning a bookstore changed your relationship with writing (or reading)?

Oh my goodness! To see people being enthusiastic about books. We’re very lucky with our shop. It’s been there since 1887, right in the center of Grasmere, where we have footfall all year round. People visit from around the world. Some have a long history with the shop, whose grandparents brought them because the grandparents shopped there. You get this amazing sense of the reading public, and I love that. All these different people coming in, excited about books–I’m getting a bit teary just thinking about it. So much of the time we’re told people don’t read anymore, especially young people, but what I see in the shop is all these young people come in, and they’re thrilled. They buy all sorts of different books; you can never guess what they will buy off of what they look like. Seeing that side of things is so heartening.

What do you wish more people knew about owls?

They are really loving. That’s the thing that struck me watching them. We often think about predators as having less care, less empathy. I think particularly birds of prey we don’t think of as family animals. Seeing the owlets care for each other, and the parents care for them, was just amazing.

There’s a farm in Yorkshire with all this owl habitat, and owl cams in the nests, and the owner had a pair of owls that lost their chicks. But somebody gave him some orphaned owlets, and he popped them in the nest, and they just went: oh! Look! A chick! And now every year he ends up with orphaned owlets and he pops them in with their chicks and the parents go, OMG! Another owlet! This is amazing! They’re so happy to accept them. It’s not just red in tooth and claw. There are lots of examples of care and cooperation.

This interview originally ran in the February 6, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

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The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin

Posted on February 16, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In a gritty world bordering on hopelessness, a man and a boy form a friendship that may just save them both.

Willy Vlautin (The Horse; The Night Always Comes; Don’t Skip Out on Me) applies his characteristic compassion and spare tone to an unlikely friendship in The Left and the Lucky, a novel of hard times and scant hope. A boy whose life has been ruled by abuse and neglect and a man whose hard work has been rewarded by betrayal and loss find each other in working-class Portland, Ore., and forge a hard-won bond to their mutual benefit.

Russell is eight years old and small for his age. He lives with his grandmother, who has dementia; his mother, who works nights; and his teenaged brother, who is angry and troubled. As the latter spins further afield and poses an increasingly serious physical threat, Russell dreams of building a boat or an airplane to take him away to an unpopulated island near Hawai’i: he can think of no nearer salvation.

Eddie lives next door. He runs a small house-painting business, working six or more days a week, and his main employee is a scarcely functioning alcoholic whose paychecks Eddie handles for him with scrupulous honesty. It will take the bulk of the novel for Vlautin to reveal the rest of Eddie’s painful past, gradually filling in the reasons for his generosity. Russell turns up on Eddie’s rounds of the neighborhood: out too late, hiding from something. The man offers the boy food, a ride home. Russell begins waiting in Eddie’s backyard each night after work; he cleans paintbrushes after the workday. Eddie gives him odd jobs and shelter from violence. Each is lacking something in a life lived on the margins, but together they begin to build a slight, meaningful solution. They restore an old Pontiac and care for an old dog. Each finds in the other someone who needs them to survive.

In his eighth novel, Vlautin continues to focus upon an American underclass marked by desperation and poverty, people often forgotten or abandoned. With a gruff tenderness, a quiet lyricism, and moments of humor, he highlights not only the built family that Russell and Eddie assemble, but also motley characters from their neighborhood: Eddie’s employees, an aging aunt, a waitress with goals, Russell’s seething brother. The Left and the Lucky is often grim, but Eddie’s dogged decency uplifts even in this grayscale world of limited options; his unwillingness to give up on Russell offers a slim but profound thread of hope unto the story’s end. Vlautin’s character sketches and the careful value he places on perseverance are not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the February 13, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 brushes.

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Like This, But Funnier by Hallie Cantor

Posted on February 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A 30-something woman writing for television comedy in Los Angeles must wrestle with personal and social as well as professional qualms in this discomfiting and hilarious debut.

Hallie Cantor’s first novel, Like This, But Funnier, is a hilarious and brutally honest send-up of comedy writing for television, a serious consideration of the woes of modern womanhood, and a compassionate telling of one woman’s fumbling journey.

Caroline Neumann is 34 years old. After a relatively successful and socially engaged stint in New York writing for a sketch comedy show, she moved to Los Angeles to write for a sitcom, which was then canceled. She’s been working from home for the past four years–if you can call it “working” when she’s mostly doing unpaid “development.” “In their twenties, she and [husband] Harry had happily not known together” whether they wanted to have kids. But in the interim, he became sure that he did, while Caroline remains doubtful. Harry used to be unhappy at work, too, but now he is a therapist. “They’d made a little home in the despair together. Until he’d abandoned her to go off and get a fulfilling career that he loved. How dare he.” Now, dubiously employed and depressed, Caroline navigates lonely, work-from-home desperation, cataloging all the ways in which she can feel bad (down to the varieties of milk she might put in her coffee: “oat milk: cliché spoiled California millennial princess, very bad”), while Harry nudges her to consider motherhood.

Propelled by work-related frustration and curiosity about Harry’s favorite therapy client, whom she knows only as “the Teacher,” Caroline indulges in a tiny bit of snooping. When she happens to mention a tidbit from the Teacher’s life in a meeting with a producer, however, events snowball beyond Caroline’s control, until she finds herself working on an actual television script featuring the confidential details of a woman’s life that she has no business knowing. Caroline, for whom failure and rejection have come to feel like a professional norm, figures that rather than withdraw from the questionable project, she’ll just tank the pitch meeting: “Why bother quitting when you could fail instead?” And just to keep things complicated, she assents to freeze her eggs for possible future motherhood, as “spiritual atonement for stalking and befriending [her] husband’s favorite therapy patient.” What could go wrong?

Cantor brings her experience writing for Arrested Development, Dollface, and Inside Amy Schumer to Caroline’s often excruciating story: despite the considerable pathos, these conflicts are deeply funny. This protagonist–liable to clog a toilet at the most inopportune moment, frozen by self-loathing, desperate to do the right thing in an industry that’s never heard of it–is, against all odds and her own fears, uncomfortably easy to relate to. Like This, But Funnier is winning, awkward, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Zoom calls.

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I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley

Posted on January 16, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A solitary aging painter rages against the slow loss of her partner to dementia in this spare, feeling first novel.

Wrestling with grief, love, and creation, a reclusive painter struggles to navigate the decline of her beloved with the help of a loyal 13-year-old neighbor, a trusty pickup truck, and a couple of shovels. Nancy Foley’s I Am Agatha is a striking first novel, jumping off from scant details of the life of a true historical figure to follow the author’s imagination beyond. Like its protagonist, this story is sure-footed and occasionally, markedly vulnerable.

Based upon the painter Agnes Martin, Foley’s Agatha Smithson leaves 1960s New York City to resurface in New Mexico, where she builds an adobe house on a high mesa, lives mostly apart from society, and creates her life’s finest works. She’s passionate about her home and her “ocean canyon”: “It’s ridiculous that anything goes on anywhere other than Mesa Portales, that one can isolate oneself from the world but still it goes about its business.” She is prickly, domineering, capable of grim humor. “You’d sure make my job easier if you could give a straight answer now and then,” comments a local lawyer. “But I guess it’s not in your character.”

Agatha is peremptory, “quick to recognize the correct path forward in all situations.” She is given to strong allegiances but demands great loyalty and holds long grudges; her friends are few and precious. Thirteen-year-old Josey is, like Agatha, obstinate, free-willed, and given to few words. He is her ally, a valued hard worker, and a vital human connection. Agatha has one great love, found later in life: a widow named Alice, who lives alone with a secret buried in her backyard. As Alice’s dementia worsens, Agatha will be late to learn what secrets have been kept from her, too. Fierce and indomitable, Agatha is also overwhelmed by love and grief.

Driven by commitment to her work, which she takes very seriously, Agatha is moved not at all by the opinions of others. But in Alice, she finds something different and shocking. “Work is not the only thing in life,” Agatha says, to a young disciple’s incredulity, but “I surprise myself by feeling it to be true. I would do anything possible, anything at all, to keep Alice with me.” Agatha’s big, brash personality and determination to grow old with Alice is pitted against more staid forces like Alice’s son, who would rather move his mild-mannered mother into assisted living. An accomplished artist and staunch recluse, Agatha does not easily brook resistance, but the end of Alice’s life will be one of her greatest struggles. I Am Agatha is an arresting, darkly funny, and heartrending consideration of life, love, and endings.

This review originally ran in the January 12, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 peanut-butter-and-tomato sandwiches.

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Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

Posted on January 9, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The horrors of coming-of-age meet ectoplasm and spiritual mediums in a boarding-school gothic that confronts fear, longing, authority, and death.

Avery Curran’s Spoiled Milk is a gothic boarding-school tale of suspense filled with small and large horrors, schoolgirl skirmishes, lust, death, and the supernatural.

In the fall of 1928, Emily Locke is settling into her final year at Briarley School for Girls in the English countryside as one of a tight-knit group of seven upper-sixth girls. Emily’s family life is unhappy–not unusual among her year, but perhaps especially so–and Briarley has been her effective home since she was 11. Her very best friend, the girl she loves, is Violet, “next to whom all others paled in comparison. She had always seemed more real, more vivid than the rest of us.” The book opens on Violet’s 18th birthday, when the whole school celebrates and fawns over her. “I hoped that later she might give me one of the silk ribbons that tied the parcels together, pressing it into my hand before bed like a mediaeval lady giving a knight a favour to tuck into his armour.” It is also the night that Violet dies. When the girls gather after the funeral for a midnight feast to honor her in their own way, they find that the freshest milk on the school grounds has inexplicably gone bad. These are the first clues that more change is afoot than the girls’ coming-of-age.

One of Violet’s birthday gifts was a contraband book called Spiritualist Phenomena and Mediumship. “Supernatural exploration was the sort of thing one always hoped might happen at school,” but Briarley has always been staid and safe, if a little boring, until now. With Violet gone, Emily and her remaining classmates determine to find out what happened–who or what killed her, and why the food at the school has begun to taste strange. They contact a medium in the village. They try a séance of their own. The relationships within their small group are strained by jealousies, conflicting priorities, and secret affections. Emily’s chief rival is Evelyn, whom she finds both infuriating and fascinating. “Evelyn’s people were Presbyterians,” and she opposes their spiritualism as unchristian and wrong. But the oddities and accidents at Briarley intensify even as Evelyn’s discomfort grows, and their experiments with the spirit realm feel ever more life-and-death, until it seems that no one will get out of Briarley alive.

Spoiled Milk contains echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in Curran’s intimate, first-person, reflective voice for Emily, among other similarities. Tensions rise for the small group of girls in this closed-room thriller, as petty rifts give way to serious terrors, and readers will keep guessing until the final pages. Classic, but still surprising, Curran’s first novel will satisfy gothic fans.

This review originally ran in the January 5, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 satsumas.

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Haven by Ani Katz

Posted on January 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In a masterpiece of tension, set within a lavish island community for the corporate select, a disappeared infant calls into question everything one mother thought she knew.

Ani Katz’s Haven is a chilling story about an apparent utopia that is anything but. As Caroline boards a ferry with husband Adam and infant son Gabriel for an exclusive getaway on a lovely island enclave, she is, first of all, relieved. After a trying period of his unemployment, Adam’s job with corporate giant Corridor gives him the means to join an elite group of friends and coworkers in a spaceship (Caroline’s description) of a house on the outskirts of Haven, a longtime home of the rich.

Caroline has never quite understood what it is that Corridor does–something with “infrastructure”–but she’s grateful that Adam is employed and seemingly less depressed. Now she hopes to relax, get to know Adam’s friends a little better, perhaps strengthen her bond with Gabriel, maybe even get some artistic inspiration back. Ever since becoming a mother, her photography has suffered. She attempted a project about motherhood, but “was getting bored with her baby as a subject.” Even on the island, seeking subjects, she worries: “What if she never made an interesting photograph again?” But in Katz’s tautly plotted psychological thriller, it turns out that photography may be the least of Caroline’s concerns.

Caroline’s roommates for the summer, Adam’s Corridor colleagues, indulge in eating and drinking to excess and unfamiliar, unnamed drugs, but they also coo over Gabriel and give Caroline the occasional break for a proper shower. She is trying to lean into the novel, luxury experience. The island’s wider inhabitants, however, strike her as being just a little off. Tinkly laughter, choreographed dance, and uncanny children degrade into shadowy threats: angry islanders, old rituals and sacrifice, and corporate surveillance. Then comes the nightmarish morning when Caroline wakes up and Gabriel is gone. As she searches for her son and the truth of what happens in Haven, she will come to question even the rules, and the people, she thinks she knows best.

If Haven ever begins to feel like it might trend toward the formulaic, be assured that Katz (A Good Man) is about to twist her tricky narrative again, always catching Caroline, and readers, unawares. This masterpiece of tension turns absolutely terrifying by its finish. Technology, hubris, deception, and mistrust combine in an unsettling corporate dystopia that asks what ends would justify which means. Riveting, thought-provoking, and ever surprising, Haven is not for the easily unnerved.

This review originally ran in the December 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 hats.

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Little One by Olivia Muenter

Posted on December 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young woman’s troubled past resurfaces in this novel of psychological suspense and secrets.

Olivia Muenter’s Little One chills and entertains with the story of a young woman whose fresh start is interrupted.

Since leaving the intentional community run by her father in rural Florida, Catharine West has built herself a life from scratch in New York City. She has a successful copywriting career, visits the public library at least once a week, runs daily, and enjoys a snarky friendship over drinks with the disarming Stella, who says of Catharine’s library habit, “You do realize this isn’t actually a Nora Ephron film.” She doesn’t date much, which Stella attributes to a bad breakup or fear of change. Catharine holds people at arm’s length, privately enforcing upon herself some of the same obsessive standards she learned back at the farm, including extreme fasting and self-deprivation. She has shared her past with no one, which is why it’s so alarming when a journalist e-mails out of the blue with questions about “a little-known, now-defunct cult in central Florida.” Catharine’s carefully crafted, tightly controlled existence is threatened. But in balance with that risk hangs the chance that she might recover the one part of her past that she never meant to lose: her sister.

Little One, Muenter’s second novel (following Such a Bad Influence), follows Catharine in alternating chapters marked “Then” and “Now.” Catharine’s remembered Florida begins as idyllic, sunny, verdant, a childhood spent “chasing the coolest parts of the day, picking tomatoes at dawn, bringing each to my nose and marveling at the smell, all at once familiar and astounding.” But what began as a close-knit community with back-to-the-land ethics gradually became something sinister, sticky, and alligator-ridden in the oppressive heat.

In the present-day timeline, Catharine becomes increasingly involved with the journalist, Reese, whom she finds both attractive and off-putting. As she strings him along, giving him just enough to get back the information she needs from his unnamed source, it may be that she’s met her match. Meanwhile, readers recognize past Catharine (in her father’s steely grip) in the present one (wielding an ironclad control over her own life). Fasting becomes exercise compulsion and an obsession with willpower; the concept of hunger, in its various meanings, is central to the plot. Muenter’s expertly moody, creepy-crawly narrative is precisely paced. Secrets as off-balance as Catharine herself are released at a tantalizing rate that might just keep the reader up all night, as the novel accelerates toward a satisfyingly surprising conclusion.

This review originally ran in the November 21, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 car keys.

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Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

Posted on December 22, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young boy faces a variety of dangers when he enters deep snow and high mountains with his father in this enthralling novel of horror, suspense, and psychological intrigue.

Tracy Sierra (Nightwatching) conjures a terrifying narrative with Warning Signs, in which a 12-year-old boy grapples with hazards on several levels. This novel of horror and abuse is both enthralling and thought-provoking, liable to keep the reader up all night for a single-sitting read or to inspire nightmares–all worthwhile for the masterful handling of serious topics.

Chapter one introduces Zach, aged 11, his younger sister, Bonnie, and their mother, Grace. They are skiing uphill into the mountains of the American West, toward a hut where they will meet with other friends. Grace, an expert outdoorswoman, educates her young children in assessing avalanche risks, in survival, and how to manage fear. Chapter two jumps forward a year. Zach is 12, headed into the same mountains with his father, Bram. Bonnie has stayed home with a nanny; Grace is gone, for reasons not immediately explained. Where Grace was kind and patient, Bram is visibly short-tempered and exasperated. Zach fears him. They are to meet a group of men and boys at a backcountry ski hut for a fathers-and-sons ski trip, organized by Bram for the purpose of securing investments from the wealthier men he envies and courts. Zach has a role to play, but has always failed his father so far, never the rough-and-tumble, thick-skinned son Bram desires. Ironically, Zach’s skiing and outdoor survival skills (thanks to his mother) far surpass Bram’s, an imbalance that will matter in the coming days.

Over the long weekend, Warning Signs ratchets up the tension until it seems it can carry no more–and then ramps it up again. Zach is aware of at least three distinct threats: the perils of the natural world, including a very real risk of avalanche; his father’s irascible self-interest and capacity for cruelty; and a mysterious creature stalking the dark and treacherously cold high-altitude woods. Bram’s gathered group of men and boys presents a dangerous combination of skill and ignorance, hubris and machismo; Zach possesses good training and instincts, but as their youngest member, will be overlooked and ignored in an irony of Greek-tragedy proportions. Through it all, Zach (in close third-person perspective) continues to mull the absence of the dearly beloved Grace, and approach the horrifying truth about her loss.

With its triple-punch of terrors natural, human, and unknown, Sierra’s sophomore novel is truly and profoundly frightening. Beyond the fine art of the horror or thriller novel, Warning Signs also considers domestic abuse and control, class and ambition, and how we try to care for those we love. Discomfiting, chilling, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the December 2, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 lost mittens.

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The Company of Owls by Polly Atkin

Posted on December 19, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A poet and nature writer shares the grace, beauty, and lessons in her quiet observations of “my neighbours, the owls” in this loving memoir.

Polly Atkin (Some of Us Just Fall) brings a poet’s sensibility to a contemplative study of nature and self with her memoir The Company of Owls. From her home in the village of Grasmere in England’s Lake District, Atkin can hear tawny owls calling to one another; on short walks, she feels privileged to watch them hunting, nesting, raising their young. During and after the Covid-19 lockdown, she marveled at their lives, so little known to us, and mused on isolation, companionship, humans’ relationship to the rest of the natural world, and more. Not an ornithologist by training, Atkin feels drawn to her poorly understood subject, associated with both wisdom and death, night-dwelling but sun-loving: “This book is about owls, but it is also about me.”

Atkin, who lives with several chronic illnesses that limit her mobility and ability to work in traditional ways, found herself under lockdown questioning the nature of solitude and our many reactions to it. She made art of Middle English words for aloneness: uplokkid, reclused, onlihede, and solnes, which become chapter titles. “But the more times I wrote the words out, the more shades of meaning leached from my brushstrokes. The more ambiguous I felt my state of seclusion to be, the more ambiguous I felt about isolation.” She related to what she perceives as the owls’ need for both separation and togetherness. In her own insomnia, she connected to their apparent affinity for both darkness and light. “Without other humans to see you and claim you as theirs, you feel less and less like one of them, more and more likely something else. Something nocturnal. Something unbound.” She watched a trio of owlets navigate siblinghood, and worked to resist what felt like anthropomorphism.

This is a classic memoir in its meditative pacing, thoughtfulness, and self-examination. And of course its author, with several volumes of poetry to her name, takes special care with both language and detail. The Company of Owls balances a careful focus on the hyperlocal owls immediately surrounding Atkin’s home, and a survey approach to the history of owls in the region, the humans who study them, and the owls Atkin encounters online via friends and algorithms. Despite the easy assumption (as she notes) that “technology disconnects us from the world around us,” Atkin benefits from a larger world of owls. That wider lens improves her view of what lies just beyond her own home: the Lake District’s tawny owls, in their small movements, births, and deaths. Atkin’s lovely, reflective memoir reminds all readers to slow down, listen, and find joy.

This review originally ran in the November 24, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 tourists.

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Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily Austin

Posted on December 5, 2025 by pagesofjulia

As its protagonist wrestles with grief and challenges to intellectual freedom, this inspiring and very funny story showcases the power of love and libraries.

In the opening scene of Emily Austin’s fourth novel, a librarian named Darcy narrates her response to a patron watching porn in the library (mainly, per policy, to leave him be). From here, Darcy’s story unfolds to grapple with love, grief, mental health, the importance of libraries, and the navigation of personal, professional, and public relationships. Is This a Cry for Help? continues in the vein of Austin’s winsome work (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead; We Could Be Rats) with a disarmingly candid narrative voice, outrageous humor, and serious thinking on tough topics.

Darcy has a good life. At her public library, she gets to help a messy cross-section of humanity: not only the toddlers, book clubs, and precocious teens she originally imagined, but also people who lack stable housing or who struggle with substance abuse or mental illness, job seekers, immigrants, and people with opinions different from her own. She has a wonderful wife with whom she shares her authentic self, two cats, and a lovely home. But when Darcy learns of the death of her ex-boyfriend Ben, she is thrown off balance. The disruptions to her carefully organized life are often hysterically funny even as they are harrowing and tragic.

Darcy has just returned to work after a two-month leave of absence following a mental breakdown brought on by the news of Ben’s death. “Before this happened, if someone told me they were off work on stress leave, I might have been judgmental too. Now I understand that issues intensify when we smash them down into our boots.” She is not at her strongest for the new challenge of an alt-right self-appointed journalist harassing the library and Darcy for what he deems a series of moral infractions, including the porn-watching patron. Her community holds an array of political views and opinions on topics as personal as Darcy’s identity as a lesbian, and these values will be called into question by an attempted book ban.

Darcy’s first-person narration lets the reader see her puzzle through the motivations of those around her, parsing social cues and questioning her own choices. Since the breakdown, she’s been seeing a therapist (a process she finds “hokey,” but she’s making an honest effort), and she is well served by her earnest analysis of the actions and motivations of herself and everyone around her. “I’m not just thirty-three; I’m twenty-seven. I’m eighteen. I’m nine. I was just born. And I have to carry all of those versions of myself, the feelings they have, and the mistakes they’ve made, everywhere I go.” Thoughtful and self-aware, if often awkward, Darcy strives intentionally to live as best she can. Is This a Cry for Help? portrays a stressful period in her life, but one she ultimately inhabits with wisdom and grace. Hilarious, wrenching, endearingly odd, Darcy’s story is both enlightening and somehow comforting.

This review originally ran in the November 10, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pigeons.

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