Book Review: Frank & Red

I almost didn’t pick this one up.

The premise — grumpy old man, chatty little boy, unlikely friendship — felt familiar in the way that can sometimes mean safe and predictable. I’d been there before with books that promise warmth and deliver sentiment, that mistake cosiness for depth. I was prepared to be pleasantly entertained and quietly unmoved.

I was wrong. Completely, happily, embarrassingly wrong.

Frank & Red got under my skin in the way only the best books do — slowly and then all at once, until I was reading past midnight, telling myself just one more chapter, and then finding, at the end, that I wasn’t quite ready to leave.

Frank and Red are a complete mess. A mess that you can’t help but fall in love with. If you read A Man Called Ove, you’ll probably enjoy Frank & Red. Frank is a lot like Ove: a grumpy old man who keeps to himself until Red moves in next door.

Some books slip into your life quietly but stay with you long after you finish them. Frank & Red is one of those books. It’s a good read.

Frank & Red

Frank is a man who has decided, very firmly, that he is done. Since losing his wife Marcie — his person, his compass, the one who made the world make sense — he has retreated from everything: his son, his friends, the street outside his front gate. His days are quiet and orderly and entirely hollow, and that, Frank has decided, is fine. It is what it is. He doesn’t need anyone.

And then Red moves in next door.

Red is six. He is blonde, relentless, and talks the way a river runs — constantly, in every direction, over and around any obstacle. He has his own storm to navigate: his parents have separated, he’s in a new house and a new school, and there is a bully who makes every morning a quiet act of bravery. When his small blonde head first appears over the garden fence, and he announces himself to a deeply unwilling Frank, the stage is set.

Title	Frank & Red
Author	Matt Coyne
Genres	Fiction, Friendship, Humour
Year of Publication	2024
TLO rating	5/5

Plot - 5, Theme - 5, Characters - 5, Story - 5, Writing - 5 = 5

Overall = Strongly Recommend ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Red & Frank’s characters

Red’s voice is an absolute triumph. Coyne spent years writing about parenthood online, and it shows — he has an ear for the way small children speak that is uncannily accurate. Red does not filter. He does not edit. He says things that are simultaneously baffling and completely logical, and he says them with the unshakeable confidence of someone who has never once considered that he might be wrong.

There is a scene early in the book where Red, having appointed himself Frank’s friend entirely without Frank’s consent, appears at the fence with what he considers a generous opening conversational gambit: a detailed inventory of everything he knows about dinosaurs. Frank’s response — resigned, baffled, faintly horrified — is one of the funniest things I’ve read this year. I laughed out loud one night and then had to pretend I hadn’t.

For Frank, grief is not something that happened. Coyne writes it differently. It is the condition he lives in now. Marcie is gone, but she is not absent — she is present in every room, in every habit, in the particular way Frank makes his tea and sits in his chair and cannot bring himself to rearrange anything because the arrangement was hers.

What the Book Is Really About

On the surface, Frank & Red is about an unlikely friendship. Underneath, it is about the particular courage required to let someone in when you have decided, for very understandable reasons, to keep everyone out.

It is also about fathers and sons — the feuds that calcify when nobody quite knows how to be the first one to soften, the love that persists under years of silence and disappointment. Frank’s relationship with his son Mikey is not the centre of the novel. Still, it is one of its most quietly devastating threads, and the way it resolves — slowly, imperfectly, believably — moved me more than I expected.

And it is, through Red’s eyes, a children’s-eye view of adult mess: the separations, the silences, the things grown-ups do that make no sense from the outside. Red doesn’t judge any of it. He watches and questions, and, in his questions, makes the adults around him see themselves a little more clearly.

And if it had come as a surprise that adults did not know everything, it was even more of a shock to find out that, in fact, it was worse: adults were idiots.

Frank & Red is a warm, generous and funny novel.

Final Thoughts

Frank & Red belongs on the shelf alongside A Man Called Ove and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry — novels that take small, quiet journeys with unlikely protagonists and end up saying something large and true about what it means to be alive and in need of other people.

I picked it up expecting nothing, actually. I finished it feeling, in some small but real way, restored.

That is the best thing a book can do. And this one does it beautifully.