3.5 stars rounded upwards.

Road Trip is a new spring romcom novel by prolific author Mary Kay Andrews. My thanks go to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Macmillan Audio for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public June 2, 2026.

The premise is that two sisters must bury their late mother and deal with her estate. Maeve is the good girl who put her life on hold to care for their mother during her final illness; Therese is an actor, and hasn’t even called home for a good long time. The sisters have become estranged over the years, but now they are back in the home they grew up in. Their mother left behind a painting that she says was done by a famous artist, and should be worth a great deal, but to establish its origin and its worth, they must go on a road trip in Ireland together. In fact, neither of them gets a dime if they don’t! She’s left them very little but the painting itself and some travel money. They aren’t happy about it, but they go.

The first half of this story just about wore me to bits. It seemed formulaic, and I felt like my IQ became lower with every tiresome page. The effect was heightened by the narrator, Kathleen McInerney, whose high-pitched little girl voice grated on me. I reminded myself that I’ve encountered this narrator before while reading the same author, and I eventually got used to her voice, and so I soldiered on, vowing to finish this thing, write my review, and stay away from this author in the future unless I was reading her Christmas novels, which always please me. I promised myself that next time, I’d only use the digital review copy, thereby bypassing the narrator.

But then a funny thing happened in the second half. Gradually I found myself warming to the story—and yes, I became more acclimated to the narrator as well. By the seventy percent mark, I was actively looking forward to it. And this is the reason why I have rounded my rating upwards; I would much rather have a book start out a bit slow and build to something bigger, than to have it start out like gangbusters and then fizzle later on.

I suspect that the author’s faithful readers will like this book just as much as her others; for those not previously initiated, you may enjoy this if you need something on the light and breezy side. It is to those readers that I recommend this story.