Hold you diary and cancel your appointments. You won’t want to put this down (and it’s a 650+ page commitment). I loved it.

The Casey brothers and their (extended) families are a tight knit bunch. Or so it seems until one family member gets a bump on the head a the home truths start to spill forth.

Marian Keyes has delivered and then some with this book. The plot develops incrementally (and believably) but it’s the characters which keep everything moving along. All are rounded and bring something to the party. At no point does the narrative dip (despite the length) and it nicely swings between laugh out loud funny and poignancy. A solid 4.5*.

With many thanks to #netgalley and Michael Joseph/Penguin UK for an advance copy in consideration of an honest review.

I want more! And given that this is a long old book, that's really high praise.

I fell in love with these characters. And the characters are 100% what drives this story. Marian Keyes has always been a master of creating believable, relatable people, and has perfected the art of writing relationships - whether those are familial, romantic, or platonic.

Much of this book happens through glimpses into the Casey family's life via extended vignettes. We catch up with the characters each time there is a family gathering - five in the space of a year in this case. The book opens during the fifth one, where things appear to come to a head, and then the reader is immediately transported months back into the past to witness how tensions shifted and built up towards that opening scene.

The cast of this book is huge for one family, and a large number of them are first person narrators too. For many books this would be a too many, however it works so well here as the thin threads of plot intertwine and converge towards the climax.

I managed to relate to almost every character (with a couple of notable exceptions), even when they were on opposing sides of an argument or situation. They are flawed in mostly everyday ways, meaning that I as the reader could picture myself in the place of many of them.

Among the light-heartedness, there are some weighty themes contained within the story. Cara's battle with bulimia is terribly sad, and on more than one occasion I found myself tearing up. What got to me most was that - thanks to the multiple first person narratives - the reader saw the stark contrast between her own self-image and how other people saw her.

What helps make the characters feel so truly human is the amount of insecurity that each experiences - that majority of which is totally unknown to the others.

There is also a constant underlying thread of denial, particularly from the three main female characters. Jessie is in denial about her financial situation. Cara is in denial about her eating disorder. And Nell is in denial about the person who she married.

Speaking of Liam, it was interesting to note the decreasing age of the women who caught his eye. He went from Paige, to Nell, to Sammie, and then to Robyn. It's mentioned in the book, particularly when it came to Robyn, but it's unsettling to read. Liam was the least likeable character by far, and one of the few who I found no redeeming qualities in.

The main theme of this book, however, is family. And the titular relationships of "grown ups" that this involves. It's chaotic. It's fragile. It's messy. And little things can change everything.

The book doesn't remotely feel incomplete, but I'm still itching for more!

Rating: 4.5/5

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Marian Keyes is on top form with her latest, a gorgeously sprawling character-driven feast of a book following the fortunes of the Casey family - brothers Johnny, Ed and Liam , their respective wives Jessie, Cara and Nell, plus assorted children. Businesswoman Jessie is the one who holds it together, gathering the family at regular intervals for various iterations of A Bit of a Do. Safe to say all the characters have their ups and downs, relationships change, develop and disintegrate, there are challenges with work, illness and murder mystery weekends, some people grow and develop into pretty great people and others turn out to be disappointing jerks.

Marian Keyes always excels at hilarious dialogue and Grown Ups is no exception, seems everyone in Ireland has a degree level qualification in Witty Banter. But deeper issues are touched upon, too.

A cracking read with its heart firmly in the right place.

What a treat an advance copy of the new Marian Keyes book and I loved it. It is full of funny sad humour and a great storyline. I am yet to read a book by her I haven't loved. If you need a pick me up like sliding into your pyjamas and snuggling on the sofa this is it.
It is like meeting your best friend unexpectedly
Pre order this book it will cheer you up. The characters are real you feel like you are part of their circle and I feel bereft now it is finished Fantastic!!

"Living's such hard work, these days. Every moment has to be Instagram worthy."

I'm familiar with this author from The Break Up, and instantly recognised similar themes running through this new work on the nature of relationships. True to form, Marian Keyes continues to write believable, fully fleshed out characters that are disturbingly relatable even when they are occasionally bonkers. In Grown Ups, embedded deeply between quickfire wit and constant banter there is an assured look at growing up from the perspective of the newly independent and also the middle aged. Highlighting maybe that none of us know what the hell we're doing and every person who pretends to be adulting is just making it up as they go along.

The book is not perfect, in fact I did sometimes grow weary of the charmingly precocious saccharine children with their unbelievable dialogue. I also sometimes felt that I was snooping on text messages as for whatever reason every character speaks in abbreviations- I am not Irish but have never once heard anyone say BTW or IMO so it distracted. About halfway through the story began to diverge so much that it was occasionally difficult finding all the strands back to the centre, but strap in tight. Once the fireworks go off in the final act, the drama explodes like the end of a Tarantino film.

I had slightly mixed feelings when NetGalley approved me for Marian Keyes new novel Grown Ups which isn’t out until February next year. I’m a big fan of Keyes’ work, her deceptively light style, combining a laugh out loud humour with searing insight and moments of real emotional punch, and her talent for unreliable narration and slow reveal which can turn a book, and your feelings about it, on their head within just one sentence. Her last novel The Break was a perfect example of this, up there with the superlative Rachel’s Holiday as books which should — and probably would if they were written by a man — transcend whatever divide there is between popular and ‘literary’ fiction. So, although I was pretty sure I’d enjoy Grown Ups, I knew it was a lot to ask for any book to follow The Break. I needn’t have worried…

Warning: do not, like I did, start to read this book when you’re on any kind of deadline. What I wanted to do was build a blanket and cushion fort on the sofa, surround myself with snacks, make space for the dog and not surface until I finished it. Instead, I had to combine it with a deadline, the day job, and the occasional spot of parenting. However, this meant that instead of glommimg it in one day I managed to make it last three.

Grown Ups starts at a birthday dinner. The Caseys are a family who get together a lot, often whether they like it or not. Jessie, married to Johnny Casey, is an only child and therefore likes to keep not only her own five children but her husband’s brothers and their wives and children close, with lavish hospitality and holidays to bind them close. But at this dinner, tensions are running high as months of secrets simmer hotter than the soup. Cara, married to Johnny’s younger brother Ed, starts to blurt out those secrets thanks to a concussion sustained earlier, and as a result of just a few blunt statements Jessie’s, Johnny’s and the whole family’s lives start to unravel. The narrative then takes us to Easter six months earlier and then through several key family events until we arrive back at the dinner and then beyond, following those events from multiple viewpoints, carefully unveiling secrets as it goes.
Keyes captures brilliantly the impossible paradox of being a 21st-century grown-up, furiously trying to keep up, pretending you know what you’re doing, never feeling like you’re enough, parenting children brought up in a world it’s difficult to understand, and sometimes just wishing someone else would sort it all out for you. The three brothers, products of an unloving home, are all messed up in different ways. Johnny covers up his insecurity with charm and good nature, aware that to many people he’s just superficial. Ed’s a nice guy, but is his niceness enabling the secrets tearing apart his marriage? And Liam? Liam’s an arse. The question is, what on earth does the lovely Nell see in him? Meanwhile Jessie hides her bone deep insecurity through lavish hospitality and spending, and refusing to look into the future, Cara is equally in denial, risking her marriage and health in the process. Finally Jessie’s eldest son Ferdia has to go through the painful process of growing up, throughout the novel moving from rude, entitled youth to a compassionate and promising young man (and dangerously sexy with it).

Grown Ups is populated by cast of three-dimensional characters, alive in every way. Every person from six year old knowingly precocious Dilly to the Casey brothers’ father is perfectly drawn even if only on the page for a couple of sentences. It’s hard not to read Grown Ups and see your own insecurities spread down the page: money, body image, family, the future, friends, likeability, making the right choice. It’s a compulsive read, funny and dark and knowing like the best of Keyes’ work and I absolutely didn’t want it to end. In fact, I absolutely want a Walsh sisters-type sequel please. Highly highly recommended.

For the first, say, five percent of this book I was a little unsure. It's a lot of characters thrown at the reader very quickly and it's a little tricky initially to connect and keep everyone straight (marketing, if you are reading this, I would genuinely discuss the possibility of including a family tree in the prelims with the editor). BUT! You have to push past this initial sense of feeling overwhelmed, because this book will drawn you in and claim your heart. All of the brilliance of Marian Keyes is completely on display here - her warmth and emotional intelligence, her ability to draw both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters in a believable and sensitive way, her humour, her wisdom and empathy. I read this book in a day because there was nothing I wanted to do more than sink into it. Yes, it's long, but I wouldn't cut any of it. Yes, there are lots of characters, but I wouldn't take any of them out. This book let me enjoy the pure pleasure that the best reading experiences give you; when you want nothing so much as to be in the book's world and the company of the characters and you're genuinely sad to reach the end because you don't want to say goodbye. Also, as all Marian's writing does, it made me wish I was Irish. Or at least that I had extended family in Ireland.

Grown Ups by Marian Keyes is a novel about the lives of three brothers, their wives and children and how things unravel for them.