Ask Again, Yes
This is a lovely, heartrending novel. It’s not a mystery or suspense, and though several of its characters are police officers, it’s not a police procedural. But I think you’ll enjoy it. In 2019, the year it was published, it was selected as Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show Summer Read after five days of audience voting that garnered nearly a million votes.
The story takes place in Gillam, a small town near New York City. Francis Gleeson, a young NYPD police officer, convinces his wife Lena that they should buy a house there because it’s affordable and has a yard. Lena is not happy about leaving the city, but agrees because she sees it means a lot to him. She’s lonely, but they quickly have two baby girls who keep her busy.
When Brian Stanhope, another police officer in the same precinct as Frances, buys the house next door to the Gleesons and moves there with his pregnant wife Anne, Lena hopes she could become a friend. Lena offers to lend them baby equipment, but Anne rebuffs her.
Anne’s baby is a boy, Peter. Six months later Lena gives birth to a third daughter, Kate. Growing up next door to each other, the two children are constant playmates and remain best friends into the school years. As time goes on, it becomes clear that Peter’s mother, Anne, has serious mental health issues, though the children aren’t fully aware of it. She tries to discourage their friendship but can’t keep them apart.
The summer that they are thirteen, about to graduate from eighth grade, Peter and Kate’s friendship starts to blossom into something more. One night they sneak out to a local park and kiss, and Peter says they’ll get married one day. It’s a sweet, innocent interlude — but it becomes a watershed; events that flow from it prove tragic, resulting in the Stanhopes having to move away and Kate and Peter being forbidden to have any further contact.
The novel follows these characters through several years of complications. Kate and Peter reconnect as young adults, and despite everything that has happened, they still love each other. Though opposed by their families, they marry and begin raising a family. But past events still have an impact in the present, not just for Kate and Peter but for their parents as well. They all struggle to deal with the challenges that life throws them.
These characters are beautifully portrayed, fully three-dimensional and believable. Themes in the novel include denial, mental health, love, transgression and forgiveness. There’s tenderness and grace in a deeply moving story that will keep you glued to the page to see how it all unfolds.
Mary Beth Keane was born in 1979 to Irish immigrant parents; she grew up in Pearl River, a small suburban town north of New York City. Her parents were not readers and her family home didn’t have books, but she learned early that she loved reading and writing. In 1999 she graduated from Barnard College with a BA in English literature; she credits one of her professors there with giving her the confidence to believe she could be a writer. She and her husband — the childhood sweetheart who she married in her mid-twenties — moved to Charlottesville so she could attend the University of Virginia, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction in 2005.
Her writing quickly earned her accolades. Her first novel, The Walking People, was published by Penguin in 2009 and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first novel. In 2011 she was named to the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35", and her second novel, Fever (2013) was named by NPR books as one of their favorite books of the year.
Ask Again, Yes, published in 2019, was her breakout novel, becoming a New York Times bestseller and translated into twenty-two languages.
Her fourth novel, The Half Moon (2023) is again set in Gillam, the same fictional setting as Ask Again, Yes. It’s a town much like Pearl River, the town where Keane grew up and where she and her husband now live with their two sons, in a house next door to the one she lived in as a child.
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