Close to the end of Frances Macken’s debut novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here, Katie, the narrator, visits Evelyn, her lifelong friend. The characters are now in their early twenties and still living in their hometown Glenbruff, a fictionalized rural community in the west of Ireland. Evelyn is distraught, and she indulges in this role. When Katie arrives, she finds her friend wearing oversized sunglasses in her dark bedroom, the curtains closed as she spends Sunday afternoon in bed. “People were expecting big things from me,” she tells Katie. “I was expecting big things from myself.” Evelyn goes on to tell Katie how she wouldn’t understand, as though they didn’t share the same dreams of getting out of their small town as children and hadn’t spent years planning their futures together, or weren’t both still in Glenbruff. Following these young women from their childhood to their 20s, Macken’s novel grapples with the successes and disappointments that splinter their friendship. This tension between expectation and reality — between dreams and growing up — becomes a driving narrative force in the novel.

The book opens when Katie and Evelyn are children in Glenbruff in the early 1990s, a setting that Macken uses to intensify the class conflict going on in the story’s background. Katie’s father works in maintenance at the factory that employs most of the small town, while Evelyn’s family has money that grants them status in the community. While Macken explores the heightened stakes these differences have in the confined setting, her depictions of Glenbruff make it clear that Katie and Evelyn are equally dreamers as they play around their hometown. They include a third girl, Maeve, in their early adventures, because she is Evelyn’s cousin and “when you’re cousins it’s a given that you’re friends.” The three explore the empty fields and overgrown railroad tracks; they pass by the graveyard and the church. They stop in a quarry no longer in use:

We play in the disused quarry and sit in the old machinery left to rust, attempting to force the dusty gear stick and turn the gigantic steering wheel, its rubber coating bubbled with age and heat.

Katie, Evelyn, and Maeve play in this unusual setting, with machinery that’s long been abandoned by the adults with failed plans and, likely, failed financing. This opening scene feels nostalgic, with children making toys out of their surroundings and their imagination. But the danger is clear, as the kids risk more than scrapes or scratches climbing this machinery and racing into the quarry. This setting also presents a sharp contrast between these girls and their hometown: The girls have potential ahead of them yet Glenbruff is filled with reminders that the setting itself doesn’t. Later in the novel, Katie’s father points out that even though a new family hasn’t moved to town in over a year, the graveyard is full.

Expectations can loom large in a small town, especially one that’s getting smaller. The town has plenty of attention to focus on only a few children, plenty of hopes for this next generation to revive Glenbruff or accomplish more. Katie and Evelyn share creative ambitions to leave their hometown and work in films, and they purposely keep Maeve on the outskirts, inviting her only to be present, not included. The girls anticipate fame and fortune much as they anticipate attention from the local boys — for the thrill and the achievement and, more importantly, because it’s what Evelyn wants, and Katie follows.

Even in the novel’s early scenes, Katie’s narration is endearing. She is a keen observer, especially as she annotates conversations with analysis and her own unspoken thoughts. She is often unsure of herself, but she is sure of Evelyn:

When we’re all together, the world revolves around Evelyn, and why wouldn’t it. Her long hair shimmers in the glare of high summer, sun-bleached at the temples. She has new things to wear: a peach sundress and sandals with leather butterflies sewn on the ankle straps. She’s full of herself in the lovely outfit, gaining great pleasure out of her own appearance. I see her glancing down at her sandals, fondling the hem of her dress and repositioning the thin straps over her tanned shoulders. I can almost feel the straps brushing my own shoulders. It must be great being Evelyn.

Katie presents this, like most of her descriptions of Evelyn and their friendship, as indisputable fact: it would be great to be Evelyn, who is pretty and confident, who has money and things. Katie says that the world revolves around Evelyn because she believes that’s the way it has to be. It’s unstated throughout most of the novel that it’s also because Katie needs it to be. Full of desire but not direction, she uses Evelyn to orient herself. This, of course, is a precarious foundation for a friendship, especially one that lasts beyond childhood.

Alongside this story of Katie and Evelyn growing up, there is an unsettling mystery. A new family does finally move to Glenbruff when Katie is a teenager, and she and the new girl, Pamela Cooney, find themselves in an arranged friendship, as their mothers bond. Soon after, Pamela goes missing. Katie joins the town in speculating, but she holds onto the hope that Pamela ran away and got out until years later, when the police find remains in Glenbruff. The mystery of what happened and, more sensationally, who did it unfolds over the course of the novel through this speculation, as well as news reports, newspaper clippings, and chance discoveries. Despite using all these elements of suspense, this storyline mostly exists as a subtle, persistent reminder of danger in the background.

At times, this disappearance feels like a distraction from the core of the novel. However, Mackens uses this storyline like the setting: to add depth and raise the stakes of the central friendship. The mystery presents a possibility for Katie to see her town and her life in a different way. Slowly, this prompts her to question the observations that she has assumed as fact, to reconsider the people she has accepted as honest and good her whole life. This important lesson is not the only one this mystery presents. It also frames expectations for the reader and for Katie with a sinister reminder: Growing up without reaching your dreams, without following your plans, isn’t the worst possible outcome of a girlhood.

Macken’s novel is, in the end, a coming-of-age tale deeply concerned with girlhood and its outcomes. The novel is structured in episodic chapters, some conveying big events and others reflecting on the everyday. These are similar to memories of growing up — sometimes it’s the big events that stand out, while at other times it’s a simple moment that holds meaning. Macken thrives in making meaning out of the commonplace in this novel, as she traces Katie and Evelyn’s friendship from early childhood to adulthood, inviting the reader to follow along.

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