Francesca's Party is a fresh departure for Scanlan: new publisher, price and story. For the uninitiated, Scanlan's previous fictions follow a loose winning plot of three women and a crisis: fantasy successes with careers, family and property (unrivalled insights into aspirational Ireland). Taking a solo heroine, Francesca's Party breaks with this trademark style, but as one character declares, Scanlan's baseline remains "the problem with men is they're not women".
When Francesca Kirwan, faultless corporate wife and mother finds her husband kissing his gorgeous young colleague at an airport departure gate, her life disintegrates. Marriage breakdown is an ordinary story, yet Scanlan's tale of Francesca's recovery of her self is her best book yet. You may have no interest whatsoever in a housewife the wrong side of 40, or of the slow, dull reintegration of bits of the self cleaved off to fit into a spouse's life, but Scanlan's writing is perfectly pitched, seductively familiar, easy.
There is plenty of drama, though. The pitiful husband receives a withering pay-back and Francesca, who is tougher and more relaxed than previous Scanlan heroines, takes reluctant responsibility for the cost of her passivity. The heartening subtext: men and women love tough ladies. Whether or not this novel brings Scanlan her long-awaited American success, her fans will love this book.
Martina Devlin's second novel presents itself as an excursion into the staple fiction of "thirtysomething professional misbehaving woman seeks man". For a solid 100 pages, Devlin delivers the expected sparky diagnosis and remedy for their states by two friends, Molly and Helen, both manless but not loveless.
Molly is boisterous and full of appetites, while the cloistered Helen is linked with her mythic namesake. Despite the sometimes laboured spikiness of the characters, Helen's ill-fatedness is compelling. Because, in the idiom of romance, as Devlin's characters attest, falling for someone is not "a moral issue, it's a question of love".
The notion that "you can't choose who you love" is generally well-honoured in popular fiction: marrieds, best friends, strangers, bosses, famous, rich, poor - no one is off-limits. Yet Devlin forays into the hinterland of all romance, the why of falling in love rather than the how. Thus first love, in which one supposedly learns that one parent in fact "belongs" to another and not to oneself, becomes the backstory for romantic wishes for intimacy and self- definition.
Be Careful What You Wish For imagines two parents so unlovable that this first lesson in love is unlearned and where brother and sister, mirrors of self-recognition, provide each other with all the compensations for this lack.
Devlin's novel is an unusually compassionate and psychologically convincing popular fiction, entertaining, engrossing, yet sensitive to lived realities without finding its characters' yearnings repugnant.
Kathy Cremin writes and lectures on popular culture