I read Kennedy Girl in June 2023 along with it’s precursor, A Theory of Expanded Love. My work suffered, the laundry languished as I devoured these wonderful books.

The two novels follow the transformation of Annie Shea from a gawky twelve year old, desperate to make her mark as # 6 in a Catholic family of thirteen children (fourteen by the novel’s end), into an unstoppable seventeen year old as Kennedy Girl, the sequel of A Theory of Expanded Love, opens in Pasadena California in 1968.

Kennedy Girl
1968. What a year to be seventeen. Hair is opening on Broadway. Bobby Kennedy is campaigning to run for President on a social reform platform. The assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King have unsettled America’s self image for many people, including Annie Shea.

Annie is cast in a musical revue of songs from Hair, directed by lecherous Father Sullivan and starring Lucas, a charismatic black dancer from a Catholic School in Watts. Annie’s older sister, the rebellious Madcap, is dating a Jew against her parents wishes. Annie’s older brothers are enlisting to fight in Vietnam with the enthusiastic support of their father, a former Commander in the US Navy. What can go wrong when Annie sneaks out of the house to join Madcap and Lucas in working on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign?

Kennedy Girl hits all the high points of that idealistic, troubled and iconoclastic year. Feminism, abuse of power, assassination, racism, war, loyalty and duty—these themes effortlessly unfold in this believable multi-layered narrative.

Caitlin Hicks has come to these novels following a distinguished career as a Canadian playwright, performer, and screen-writer. She has toured internationally in one woman monologue productions. This lived experience as a performer of what she writes has guided the dialogue, diary entries, and self-examination of Annie as she navigates the transition from teen to young woman, from the structured safety of home to the wider world.

I loved both books, I hope you will too.