‘Sensitive Protagonist’ Anchors Freya, Kirkus Says

The debut novel by screenwriter Meg Richman is praised by Kirkus Reviews for its “sharp, poignant prose” and “sensitive protagonist.” Freya the Deer publishes March 3; preorder this coming-of-age novel now.

Here’s the review:

Freya Rubenstein, a young girl from Cambridge, Massachusetts, struggles to make friends. She seems expressionless to some, strange and aloof, and she loses herself in whimsical fairy tales and Victorian novels. (In other words, she’s neurodivergent.) When she goes off to college in Washington state, at a hippie-dippy campus no “members of the Young Republicans had chosen” to attend, she learns to branch out and make new friends, falling in love in the process. Enter Caleb, a boy from Seattle who meets Freya in a freshman Humanities course. He’s taken by her direct approach to speech and her gentleness. The two become a couple, and soon they’re living together at Caleb’s mother’s home in Seattle. The curriculum at their college as well as Black Lives Matter protests quickly radicalize Caleb, and it’s unclear to what lengths he will go—and to what extent Freya will follow him—for justice. Freya is a well-developed character, and her romance with Caleb, from a spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas to the fallout of the summer protests, is both believable and fairy tale–like. The climax and denouement of the novel, rendered in sharp, poignant prose, are especially affecting.

A sensitive protagonist anchors this oddball bildungsroman.

Read the full review here.