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• The Accidental Favorite - 2025 Henry Holt and Company, New York, NY
• Amazing Grace Adams - 2023 Henry Holt and Company, New York, NY

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Fran Littlewood
  Born Frances Harriet Littlewood
  March 1972 (age 53)
  Alma mater
  Royal Holloway, University of London
  Years active 2021–present
  Children 3
  Frances Harriet Littlewood (born March 1972) is a British novelist and former journalist. She previously wrote for The Times. Her debut novel Amazing Grace Adams (2023) became a New York Times bestseller.

  Early life and education
  Littlewood is from Surrey. She completed a Master of Arts (MA) at Royal Holloway, University of London.[1]

  Career
  Littlewood began her career as a finance journalist writing for The Times.[1]

  In a two-book deal in May 2021, the imprint Penguin Michael Joseph (PMJ) acquired the rights to publish Littlewood's debut novel Amazing Grace Adams in January 2023.[2] Written during the COVID-19 lockdown and partly inspired by the film Falling Down (1993),[3] Littlewood "wanted to write a midlife heroine. Something that was a corrective to the prevailing narrative that women at this point in their lives are downtrodden and boring and over the hill".[4] The titular character struggles between divorce, perimenopause and more as she strives to deliver her daughter a 16th birthday cake.[5] Amazing Grace Adams became a New York Times bestseller in the hardback fiction category[6] and was a Today Show Read with Jenna pick.[7]

  Littlewood's second novel The Favourite (released as The Accidental Favorite in some territories) was published in June 2025.[8] It was reviewed in Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.[9][10][11]

  Adaptation
  Littlewood's debut novel Amazing Grace Adams is being adapted into a television series.[12]

  Personal life
  Littlewood lives in North London with her husband, a DJ, and their three daughters.[13]

  Works
  Amazing Grace Adams (2023)[14][15]
  The Favourite (2025) (The Accidental Favorite in some territories)

• Hot Press - https://www.hotpress.com/culture/fran-littlewood-i-couldnt-have-written-this-book-without-exploring-desire-its-a-crucial-part-of-womens-lives-at-any-age-22950682

  09 Feb 23
  Fran Littlewood: "I couldn’t have written this book without exploring desire – it’s a crucial part of women’s lives at any age"
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  Fran Littlewood: "I couldn’t have written this book without exploring desire – it’s a crucial part of women’s lives at any age"
  By Serena Bolton.
  Kate Brayden
  Kate Brayden
  A former journalist with The Times, Fran Littlewood has written what promises to be one of the literary hits of the year with her debut novel Amazing Grace Adams. It tells the story of a gifted linguist, and mother, who has finally reached the end of her tether.

  Fran Littlewood is deep into promoting her debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams, when I get time with her. She’s buzzing with excitement. Instantly, she tells me that her DJ/electronic music producer husband featured in Hot Press a number of years ago, under his Si Begg name.

  “He had loads of monikers for contractual reasons, so he comes up under loads of bizarre names,” she laughs.

  Having raised three daughters, the former business and finance journalist for The Times felt the time was right to pursue her dream of a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  “It’s hilarious, because any time I was writing an intro to a feature, I’d be putting in all of these beautiful adjectives. It was the only place I could have fun with it,” she grins. “Then I travelled with my husband’s work, had my kids and did a Masters. I don’t think the journey towards becoming an author is ever that quick, except maybe for Sally Rooney. I definitely put in my 10,000 hours before getting to this point.”

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  By Serena Bolton.
  We’re glad she followed her gut. Amazing Grace Adams – a surefire literary hit – is destined to be a Hot for 2023 phenomenon, especially with the sizeable, eager market of middle-aged women yearning to read three-dimensional representations of themselves. There’s nothing Fran shies away from in the novel, whether its heart-shattering grief, gender inequalities, raising difficult teenage daughters or the connected issues of the perimenopause, desirability, body image issues and toxic online culture.

  “I wanted to write a mid-life heroine, because I just felt so sick of these lazy representations of women in that space,” notes Littlewood. “It didn’t reflect who I saw around me, so I wanted to write about funny, smart, nuanced, interesting individuals with black humour, and this improbable idea of making Grace a form of action hero. I felt like it hadn’t been done before, and I knew I’d be able to mine some fun, while offsetting emotions through love, loss and motherhood.”

  "INVISIBLE AND UNFUCKABLE"
  As a preface to the main action, while stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter’s 16th birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. She doesn’t scream or break something or cry; she simply abandons her car and walks away. From there, we learn all about Adams’ past, from the husband she still loves who is now divorcing her, through the daughter who has banned Grace from her party to the terrible incident that caused the family to implode. Ultimately, Amazing Grace Adams is a rollercoaster ride of redemption in a world that made motherhood impossible to succeed at.

  “This period of women’s lives is finally starting to become part of a wider conversation,” says Fran. “Emma Thompson in Leo Grande is an incredible character of that age exploring desire, among other gendered concerns. One book I felt liberated me was Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. She’s this brilliant woman who breaks all of the social rules and it reaches great levels of absurdity.”

  Catharsis is present throughout, as the intense pressure and frustrations of this life stage – of motherhood and misogyny – build to stifling levels. Grace, who experienced sexism working in the TV world at 28, feels like an utter failure as a mother, wife and woman, daily reminded about (and punished for) her beauty.

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  “I wanted to examine the likability of women,” considers Littlewood. “They’re held to such a high standard, much higher than men. Female protagonists, equally, are held to just as impossibly high a mark. The anger we’re seeing in women absolutely comes out of fear and loss. I was treading a more difficult line writing Grace, because reaching these standards is hugely difficult.”

  Lotte – Grace’s daughter – is a fairly anxiety-inducing character, as most 15-year-olds dealing with a separation of their parents and endless hormone spikes tend to be.

  “There’s this real sense of loss for Grace, as Lotte is heading into adulthood,” says Littlewood. “There’s a grief there that really ambushed me, too. Everyone knows about the empty nest, but this real feeling of your child growing away from you is so potent when they’re 14 or 15. It’s all part of the process and it’s meant to happen, but it’s incredibly hard. Lotte is becoming estranged from Grace, who goes into her daughter’s bedroom at one point, and is looking at the objects like they’re clues about where her child went. I related to that scene.”

  Grace is forced to reckon with a strange jealousy as she sees Lotte becoming ever more desired in the eyes of society, while she feels as though perimenopause has (literally) sucked her dry.

  “Beauty is still the ultimate currency for women, awfully,” Fran concedes, exasperated. “I have three teenage girls and I can see them going through this, in particular with the 24-hour surveillance and onslaught of social media. The impossible standard starts at that age, but they’re all absolutely bludgeoned by this messaging. It’s ultimately the same one I had at their age. With TikTok and filters, it’s still a massive misogyny they’re exposed to.

  “As Grace describes in the book, they’re often busting out in ripe flesh just as you feel dried out. You’re seeing what you feel like you’re losing when you reach perimenopause, and there’s an awful irony in that. Jane Campion quoted how you become ‘invisible and unfuckable’ after 40. There’s such an untruth in that! All teenage girls do is criticise their appearance, just like older women. The tyranny of the beauty myth is a real preoccupation of mine.”

  THE SECOND ALBUM CURSE
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  The stigma around speaking openly about menopause and ageing in women remains severe.

  “When I started writing this in May 2020 right at the beginning of the first lockdown, hardly anyone was talking about menopause,” Fran nods. “There were a few courageous people talking about it in the public eye, but it’s still a huge taboo. There’s been a big cross-parliamentary report, but whether any change will be enacted is another story.”

  One way of revolutionising how mid-life female characters are penned was to make sure Grace Adams was a sexual being. Gone is the myth that women after 40 lose their libidos.

  “I wanted to put more sex in! I wasn’t nervous at all,” Littlewood laughs. “It’s so important. There’s bits that veer into the absurd, but I couldn’t have written this book without exploring desire. This crisis of violence against women and girls, it all felt part and parcel in terms of delving into socio-political elements that make up the daily backdrop of women’s lives.”

  Obviously others agree that Grace Adams is a powerful character, with the Mare Of Easttown producer even optioning the television rights.

  “I think he saw that Kate Winslet kickass mid-life female role in Grace Adams,” says Fran. “Loads of things get optioned and don’t go ahead, but they have got a writer on board for the television adaptation. They’re working on the pilot and I think she’s working on a second episode so you never know! I’m busy writing the second book now, which is like that difficult second album. It becomes this fear or dread, but I’m still living the dream.”

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  For many writers, finding that coveted agent is a major obstacle to getting published, but Littlewood was in demand. The 50-year-old was signed by Janklow & Nesbit agent Hellie Ogden before Amazing Grace Adams was acquired by Michael Joseph last year, in a major pre-empt by publisher Jessica Leeke.

  “At the end of the Masters course, they send agents an anthology and everyone writes around 1,000 words to contribute,” says Fran. “I was contacted as a result, and Hellie and I teamed up. She’s amazing, I feel so grateful. I finished the book that I was writing on the course maybe too quickly, and it was a nearly-but-not-quite project. I could have rewritten it, but I pitched the idea of Grace to my agent, and she knew straight away in a one-line pitch that it would be a better debut.”

  We suspect they got it right. Amazing Grace Adams is set to be one of the literary hits of the year.

  • Amazing Grace Adams is published on January 19 by Penguin Ireland.

• Shelf Awareness - https://www.shelf-awareness.com/max-issue.html?issue=522#m1088

  Wednesday, June 7, 2023: Maximum Shelf: Amazing Grace Adams

  Fran Littlewood: Fighting Back Against Impossible Standards

  Fran Littlewood
  (photo: Lucia Littlewood Begg)

  Fran Littlewood's previous work as a journalist is evident in the attention to detail found in her debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams (coming September 5, 2023, from Holt), the story of the title character's terrible day and the events that brought her to this moment. Littlewood holds an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She lives with her husband and daughters in north London.

  You indicated that Amazing Grace Adams was inspired by the 1993 movie Falling Down. What made this the right time, 30 years later, to return to that particular narrative?

  It's one of those ideas I'd always had kicking around. I think we've all had those days from hell, haven't we? And, of course, it's not acceptable as a woman, societally, to show your rage. So the juxtaposition of taking this film, which features the character [played by Michael Douglas] who goes crazy on this day and putting not just a woman, but a midlife woman, into that same situation--I love the dark humor in that. I love the improbability of it, but also that borderline feeling that many of us have been at one time or another this close to losing it.

  How does her being a woman change things? What's allowed (or not) to Michael Douglas's character that wouldn't be for Grace?

  I was always aware that there was a line there. I think an awful lot of women are living with a low boil of rage because of these pressures that we're under, and I think the shaming of female rage--the way it is completely unacceptable to show that you're angry whereas men are allowed--is just another thing that silences women. It's another tool of oppression.

  It's true for all women and girls, but particularly at midlife. The huge domestic burden, the emotional labor, everything falls to us, and we're squeezed in the middle with, on the one hand, aging parents who might be getting increasingly frail, and then at the other end of the spectrum, if you have children, you're dealing with teenagers and the delightful challenges that can bring. So there are so many pressures, and then being held to these standards? Grace is 45, and she's supposed to look 25, and everything is supposed to be perfection, again for all women and girls, but it becomes really acute in the midlife space, as you might start feeling that you're failing some of the beauty currency, the ideal beauty standard.

  I love all the nerdy language references, appropriate given that Grace and Ben are both linguists. How difficult was it to balance the action with these smaller but no less important elements?

  It's those small elements that I love the most. One of the things I struggled with when trying to get published was plot--as in, understanding that you needed to have a plot! That was a hurdle I had to overcome because I read for those moments that chime, those small, relatable moments. In terms of the language aspect, there was so much to mine in that, and I feel it was woven into the love in the book. This theme emerged of heartbreaking miscommunication, as Grace comes to realize that despite the fact that she speaks five languages, she can't find the words to articulate her heartsickness and her grief over what's happened to her family. She can't find the language to communicate with her daughter. And then with the social media rabbit hole that Lotte disappears into, Grace is forced to learn a sixth language.

  More than once, Grace just walks away. What is it about that act that feels so much like freedom for Grace: "Quietly, calmly, she has taken the bolt cutters to social convention. She has set herself free."

  I think there is a parallel to be drawn with the midlife aspect. I think about the self-consciousness that comes on through the teenage years, the way we shrink ourselves into the spaces prescribed for us. In midlife, you start to care less about how you seem. There's a level of uprising, and I'm undecided as to whether it's just that we're so exhausted that you can't keep up the facade, or whether there's a return to that more authentic self before the years of self-consciousness and the social conditioning that tells girls and then women how we need to behave.

  In middle age, we are aware that the public gaze, which we might translate as the male gaze, starts to disappear, and we can feel freed by that. But we can also be trapped in a different way.

  There's so much conflict and contradiction in this midlife space. You don't want the male gaze. You don't want these people looking at you and wolf-whistling you in the streets. But then, when it goes, there are so many questions around desire and desirability and, again, what we've been told as women and as girls is that our currency, our worth above and beyond everything, is beauty and youth.

  Simultaneously, social media makes Lotte's generation feel unable to not be seen. Grace is becoming less visible as she's aware of how visible Lotte has to be--what does that visibility and invisibility mean for them?

  In many ways, Lotte and Grace are at two ends of this spectrum. There's a moment when Grace looks at Lotte, looks at her body that seems to have been sculpted by angels, and then looks at herself and sees that her lips have almost vanished. It's an ambush, the ambush of age, but the fact remains that Lotte wrestles with the same insecurities. It's the realization that there's no ideal moment, no matter the age. We never feel we're good enough. The standards are impossible, and we can't meet them. We all feel like we're failing all the time. As intelligent, thinking women, you're horrified at yourself that you think this, and it feels like a guilty secret. But of course we're fighting a societal narrative. We're fighting the conditioning that we've had since birth.

  Issues of power and powerlessness are constant in Grace's story. In fact, it could be argued that the novel is an answer to the question: What happens when a person feels erased or powerless? Was that your original motivation in writing this story?

  When I first started to talk about the book, I felt myself wanting to say, Grace is a kickass woman, she's a warrior, and that's it. But I have this voice saying, yes, but she's also a bit tired. She's also quite overwhelmed. She's also carrying the battle scars. She's a midlife heroine, but I knew that I wanted to write the nuance into that. I wanted to erase that feeling of being erased by writing a woman who says and does all the things that we only dream of doing. When she abandons her car, she looks as though she's finally lost control. In fact, it's the moment she starts to wrest back control of her life as she sets up on this quest, and she's going to try and put things right. --Sara Beth West

• Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb - https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2023/09/q-with-fran-littlewood.html

  Thursday, September 7, 2023
  Q&A with Fran Littlewood

  Photo by Lucia Littlewood Begg

  Fran Littlewood is the author of the new novel Amazing Grace Adams. She also has worked as a journalist. She lives in London.

  Q: You’ve said that your novel was inspired by the 1993 film Falling Down. What intrigued you about that film, and how did you create your character Grace?

  A: Something about the film had stuck with me over decades. I think because we’ve all had those days when everything that could go wrong, does go wrong. Those “hell is other people” days! Show me the woman who hasn’t been this close to losing it, at one point or another…

  We have a saying in our house (and I thought this expression was quite widely used, although I’m not so sure), that we’ve had a “Falling Down moment.” These days, we say we’re having a Grace moment!

  I think one of the things that intrigued me about the film is the fact we’re rooting for an antihero. Cheering him on. I’d say that Grace is more midlife heroine, than antihero, but the narrative certainly raises interesting questions of “likeability,” especially when it comes to female protagonists and the double standards they’re held to.

  Writing Grace felt subversive. I loved the dark humour in this unlikely idea of taking a midlife woman and turning her into an action hero. The idea sprung from the fact I was so sick of lazy representations of women at this stage of their lives - the notion they’re downtrodden and past it. It wasn’t how I felt, and it wasn’t what I saw in the women around me.

  I wanted Grace to have her main character moment! Tapping into that feeling that we’re all the protagonists in our own lives.

  In terms of creating the character of Grace beyond that, I was keen for her to be an everywoman, but at the same time I wanted to give her something that made her extraordinary. It’s the reason I chose to make her a polyglot, an exceptional linguist, who speaks five languages. In this, and many other ways, Grace is my fantasy self!

  Q: The present-day action in the novel takes place over the course of one day - how did this affect your writing process as you worked on the book’s pacing?

  A: The narrative is split into three timelines. The single long, hot day, which is the present moment in the book, when Grace has hit the wall, and rises up, finally. A past section, in which we first meet Grace when she’s 28, and move forward over nearly two decades from that point. And a third timeline, that begins four months earlier than the present day.

  The narrative strands converge at the end of the book, as we piece together what’s happened to Grace to bring her to this moment she’s in.

  The single day strand - the quest element - was challenging to write, as I was concerned about it being too one note. It’s the reason I kept the chapters short and punchy, and also introduced some compassion among the chaos - some “kindness of strangers” moments, to give the section emotional dynamics, and to offset Grace’s fury!

  Having two additional timelines helped to keep the settings and characters fresh and varied.

  People have asked, did I spend a long time figuring out the structure since it’s quite complicated. The truth is, it came to me pretty organically, as it’s the only way I could see to write it, because of the secrets in the narrative and where the reveals fall.

  I started writing the book in the first lockdown, and wrote it in quite a frenzy. The unique circumstances at the time meant that everything felt very acute, and I’d finished a pretty polished first draft in just under nine months, which I’m certain will never happen again!

  Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Grace and her daughter Lotte?

  A: Grace and her teenage daughter Lotte are estranged in the present day strand of the book. Over the course of her journey, Grace comes to understand the irony of the fact that, although she speaks five languages, she hasn’t been able to find the words to articulate what she needs to say to her daughter. She’s been unable to communicate her heartsickness at what’s happened to her family.

  Theirs is a love that’s fallen through the gaps in language, which I think is something that happens in so many relationships - too often we say all the things we shouldn’t, and not the things that we should.

  Grace is demonstrating some fierce mother love, but Lotte doesn’t see it that way - as teenagers don’t. She sees it as intrusive and stifling. They’re growing apart, and it’s a necessary shift, Lotte needs to start gaining independence, Grace knows this. But there’s a real sense of loss.

  It’s something I felt with my three daughters - the ambush of this moment that, for me, happened a lot sooner than I’d expected. Too soon. The moment when, caught between childhood and adulthood, your teenager starts to push back. It’s brutal.

  But, for Grace, there are in-between moments too. Beautiful, funny, wild minutes, or hours, days even, of togetherness, flashes of the way things were between her and her daughter, something she’s determined to reclaim.

  On top of all this, there’s the near-comedic clash of hormones, the bloody awful timing of it! The fact that just as Lotte is hitting adolescence, Grace is entering the perimenopause. It’s a real “kick a woman when she’s down” situation, that struck me, and that I wanted to explore in the book.

  Q: The writer Adriana Trigiani said of the book, “Amazing Grace Adams is a fully realized story of catastrophe and joy, grief and love, and the hidden chambers of the human heart that carry the best and worst of our experience.” What do you think of that description?

  A: I was stunned when this quote from Adriana came through. How incredibly generous of her! I mean, it’s everything you would aim to achieve in a novel - a true excavation of the human condition - and it probably made me cry, to be honest (it definitely made me cry!).

  One of the joys of reading for me are those moments that chime, the moments that make you look away from the page and examine something similar that’s happened in your own life. The moments when you feel understood. So it’s just brilliant for me to think that my writing might make someone else feel that way.

  Q: What are you working on now?

  A: I’m working on the difficult second novel, and happy to say I’ve broken the back of it, hoping for a sprint finish! It’s about three sisters, a story of sibling rivalry, and specifically about the taboo of a father who inadvertently reveals that he has a favourite child. So… lots to unpack there!

  --Interview with Deborah Kalb

• Shelf Awareness - https://www.shelf-awareness.com/max-issue.html?issue=591#m1226

  Monday March 3, 2025: Maximum Shelf: The Accidental Favorite

  Fran Littlewood: The Many Things We Don't Say to Each Other

  Fran Littlewood
  (photo: Si Begg)
  Following the success of her debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams, Fran Littlewood's The Accidental Favorite (Holt, June 24, 2025), explores parental favoritism and sibling rivalry that persists into adulthood. Littlewood holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives with her husband and three daughters in north London.

  There's a growing audience for stories about a woman's experience at midlife. What does The Accidental Favorite add to this conversation?

  These women are in their 40s, asking: Are we the same person now as we were at 12 and 24 and 36? I'm interested in that whole investigation of selfhood and memory and how we change and evolve. It's a continuum, but how different are we at 45 from the person we were as a child? In the book, I'm looking at the childhood moments that are still having a great resonance on how the sisters are perceived and perceive themselves.

  Despite being the impetus for all the turmoil in the story, Patrick's perspective is more veiled than the other characters. When we do finally understand what led to this moment of favoritism, we find it was always about him. It wasn't about some quality that the girls held that made one more favored than the other. But constant social comparison makes women feel like we have to earn it.

  That's why I so wanted it to be the women who voice the book. So it's the three sisters, but we also get Vivienne's perspective as well. I thought a lot about the ways that the sisters equally judged one another's choices or behaviors yet accepted one another's choices and behavior and how that seems like a contradiction, but in a family that's how it works. And you don't need research to know that your siblings validate you and they invalidate you. They can be absolutely brutal. I think those hurts do stick with us for life, particularly with physical comments. And even if that doesn't come from your parents, it's all around you. In looking at sibling rivalry, research shows that it still exists in midlife. This isn't just a thing that you leave behind in childhood. It's set within your core that you're still battling whether or not you want to.

  As a fellow middle child, Nancy is the character I identify with the most, especially the way she tries so hard and they keep telling her she's doing it wrong.

  The Fisher family has an almost smug closeness, but there are the things they don't talk about, things they don't touch. This kind of communication void is quite a preoccupation of mine--the unsaid, the many things we don't say to each other. The research I did involves lots about family codes, family laws, family scripts, and the ways some children fit into the code. And then there are the siblings who don't fit, like Nancy. She goes against the family law because she's the truth teller. She wants to talk about the difficult things.

  Nancy, she's still the screw-up within her family, even though she's a doctor, and Eva, the youngest, feels she still isn't heard even though she's an entrepreneur who's made millions. And then Alex, the eldest, is the keeper of that family flame, the one most likely to share her parents' worldview. But even as I boiled them down to the boxes they've been put in, what I really wanted to say is that, they're all the screw-ups. We're all the screw ups, you know, we're all complex and contradictory.

  The novel shows how women will compare themselves to one another, especially regarding physical appearance. Why can't we stop comparing ourselves even when we know there's no good there?

  I mean, that's the womanhood issue, isn't it? It's this culture where beauty is prized above everything. That's the winning card as a woman. You see that in the book with Eva being "the beautiful one." It's impossible to escape that societal trap. Growing up, I felt compared with my sisters--not by my parents, but certainly implicitly by family friends--you know, the clever one, the beautiful one. And it's the same awful social comparison that I was seeing with my three daughters online, on Instagram, on all of these things that are lining these young women up together and comparing them.

  I wanted to draw a line between those two things, that being compared as a sibling and being compared online, particularly for young women. I so enjoyed writing into those difficult spaces, the ugly truths, the things that feel universal, but how often do we admit that? It's awful, that programming, where you're constantly being assessed so you're assessing, and it's all so unimportant.

  The glass house is such an interesting device--both setting and metaphor. What did it mean for you?

  When I was writing about the Dartmouth Park house, the house they grew up in, I started to think about homes as being repositories for our memories. And the Dartmouth Park house, of course, is a bit shabby, but it's got their past lives etched into the fabric of it, literally, but also in a more philosophical sense. And then the glass house, which, of course, Eva has paid for, is a glossy, beautiful, perfect house, but the bad smell starts to seep in. It's the same with any curated online image, where everything is not as it seems. The glass house is not as it seems. And in fact, the Dartmouth Park house is shabbier, but it is the place that they come back to. When Alex is driving in the rain and she says she wants to go home, she doesn't mean the home that she shares in South London with her husband. She means her childhood home.

  Yes, I loved the centering that the home gives--both to the sisters and to the narrative. When you return to the past, it sinks us into that family history and grounds us.

  It's such a rooted part of who you are, those houses we grew up in. And of course, those are the memories that we share with our siblings. Even if we experienced them in different ways, we do share those memories. When they bought the house, it was in four flats, and they dismantled this house and then put it back together. And in doing that, they were building their relationship, their marriage, their family, and over the course of the narrative, that obviously starts to fall apart. Then we get to the end, and we're looking at new beginnings and a new start. The family has been pulled apart over the course of this narrative, and we're standing at the edge of them starting to rebuild.

• The Nerd Daily - https://thenerddaily.com/fran-littlewood-the-accidental-favorite-interview/

  Q&A: Fran Littlewood, Author of ‘The Accidental Favorite’
  Elise Dumpleton·Writers Corner·June 28, 2025·6 min read

  Share
  We chat with author Fran Littlewood about The Accidental Favorite, which is a wryly resonant and deeply moving family dramedy investigating the question so many of us have asked ourselves: do my parents have a favorite?

  Hi, Fran! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
  I’m the author of The Accidental Favourite and Amazing Grace Adams, which (amazingly!) was a New York Times bestseller and Read With Jenna pick, and has been published in seventeen countries to date. I have an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, London. Before I started writing novels, I was a journalist, including a stint at The Times. Home is London.

  When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
  In a pre-memory time, I think… My parents reading to me and my sisters, my dad doing all the voices, making us laugh. Iconic books like Winnie The Pooh, Topsy and Tim, the Richard Scarry books, Travelling to Tripiti, and something about a bear named Frances… I’d have a teetering stack of about eight books by my bed throughout my childhood, and I’d read them all at once. Reading was truly my happy place. And then writing, getting lost in it, or making sense of things. I specifically remember a poem I wrote about rowing down the river close to my home, the sound of the oars, the water – maybe that’s been kept in a Scrapbook somewhere, and that’s why I remember. I just loved language, the colour of it, painting pictures with words, putting my thoughts down on the page, creating characters like the ones I’d read about.

  Quick lightning round! Tell us:
  The first book you ever remember reading: My Mum taught us all to read before we went to school, so it would have been the iconic Peter and Jane books – ‘Pat the dog has a red ball’ etc., that kind of compelling narrative! And I remember the early reading books at school, Janet and John, Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat – loved them all. The magic of decoding the words. Reading each line with a bookmark underneath, moving the bookmark down, reading the next line.
  The one that made you want to become an author: All the childhood books! (Does anyone actually answer these in a quick fire fashion?!) The Rumer Godden books, The Secret Garden, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Borrowers, Flat Stanley, Enid Blyton’s entire oeuvre, I could go on for pages. And also, I think Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, books my parents had on their shelves that I read and adored. Although mostly, I wanted to be Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music back then…
  The one you can’t stop thinking about: The Overstory, by Richard Powers. Beyond powerful on the climate crisis. It made me understand at a deep-rooted and urgent level something I knew intellectually. A true expression of the potency of fiction.
  Your latest novel The Accidental Favorite, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
  Wild, truthful, dark, funny, hopeful

  What can readers expect?
  A book about three adult sisters, whose father – following an almost-accident – inadvertently reveals that he has a favourite. It’s set in a remote glass house in the English countryside, where three generations of the Fisher family meet for what they’re hoping will be an idyllic holiday. It’s an exquisite, contemporary, expensive glass house, but there’s a seeping bad smell… The story tracks a single week, and also four decades, moving between the past and present. It’s a book about family and siblinghood, and the ‘scripts’ we can’t escape – the clever one, the pretty one, the screw up… It’s also about (unstable) memory, and the sometimes wildly different versions of the ‘same’ past.

  Where did the inspiration for The Accidental Favorite come from?
  I’m one of three sisters and I have three daughters. My younger sister also has three daughters. My older sister – slightly ruining the fairy tale-esque symmetry – has two daughters and a son. My mum is one of three sisters (and a brother), so… there’s a LOT of sister energy in our family, and I wanted to write it, as part of a wider commentary on womanhood. I saw so many parallels between the way I felt my sisters and I were compared growing up (by family friends, teachers, boyfriends…), casually and otherwise – because we came as a group, a three, and the kind of scrutiny I was seeing young women – my daughters – being subjected to, amplified more than ever before by social media. The same insidious, toxic social comparison.

  It felt a natural extension of this to address what’s surely the ultimate damaging comparison – the taboo of a parent having a favourite child. It was so interesting talking to people in the early stages of the idea because everyone has a story – there’s so much to unpack! The fact is, we’re all conditioned to fight for our parents’ attention, it’s wired in, and what particularly struck me as I researched, was that this is something that continues into adulthood. Our childhood experiences cast a long shadow, so that at some level, we’re all still competing with our siblings to see how we measure up.

  Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
  I’m the (troubled) middle child, and my husband claims I gave Nancy, the middle Fisher sister, all the best lines (I don’t think I did…), but actually, I think it’s Alex, the firstborn sibling in the book, who goes on the biggest journey. I love all the sisters, and I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite…, but I was so invested in Alex’s story. She’s the keeper of the family flame, whose thinking is most in line with her parents’ world view, but she starts to throw off the shackles as we get into the novel. There’s a particular chapter towards the end, which I can’t describe because… spoilers! But it’s quite a filmic scene, when the scales fall from her eyes, that was so compelling and fun and just brilliant to write.

  Did you face any challenges while writing? How did you overcome them?
  The toughest thing was trying to write The Accidental Favorite at the same time I was going through the publication process for my first book, Amazing Grace Adams, as I am not a fan of multi-tasking. It was such a steep learning curve for me, knowing very little about the publishing industry – meeting the teams, foreign editors, TV execs, being interviewed by journalists, rather than doing the interviewing… and I was way out of my comfort zone at times. So I was writing the Accidental Favorite in the in-between bits, always feeling I was playing catch-up. I overcame it, as you have to, with boring discipline. Sitting at the desk/ kitchen table/ in bed, and forcing myself to do the work!

  See also

  Q&A: Kate Leth, Creator of ‘Mall Goth’
  What’s next for you?
  I’m in the very early stages of writing my next book. It’s something that’s both personal and political, and I feel quite evangelical about it.

  Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?
  Books I’ve loved this year (so many, this is just a few…):

  Sandwich, by Catherine Newman
  The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray
  Careless People: A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
  Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
  Ordinary People, by Diana Evans
  The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
  The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans
  Books I’m looking forward to:

  If You Love It, Let It Kill You, by Hannah Pittard
  Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
  Flashlight, by Susan Choi
  Albion, by Anna Hope
  Will you be picking up The Accidental Favorite? Tell us in the comments below!

"I wanted to write something that properly represented the women around me; a corrective to the prevailing narrative that women at this stage of life are past it and downtrodden. One of the things I tried was to tackle the perimenopause head-on, in a raw and visceral way, spelling it out, itchy vaginas and all."

Via Zoom from her home in north London, 50-year-old Fran Littlewood is talking about her debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams. Acquired by Michael Joseph last year in a major preempt by publisher Jessica Leeke, and out on 19th January 2023, this cracker of a midlife novel is the affecting and darkly humorous story of Grace Adams, a perimenopausal woman on a quest to remind her estranged husband and teenage daughter why they used to think she was amazing--and heal their lives from a tragic event that tore the family apart. From the first paragraph ("This feeling that from nowhere she's been set on fire from the inside out..."), the reader is plunged into the emotional life of a woman whose hormones are on a collision course with those of her troubled adolescent daughter, Lotte. Stuck in a traffic jam, Grace suddenly snaps and abandons her car in the middle of the road.

Though recently fired from a teaching job, Grace was formerly a TV star, and is a supremely gifted polyglot, fluent in several languages. Littlewood tells me that certain aspects of Grace's character represent her kick-ass, fantasy self. "While she displays many of my own feelings and experiences during perimenopause, which made her very cathartic to write, she goes further in ripping up the social contract; saying and doing exactly what she is moved to do. My own years of pushed-down rage were able to surface in this fictional character." Imbuing the novel with a certain absurdity was also important to Littlewood, who reveals that she kept Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple on her desk as she was writing. "I didn't want the novel to be too earnest and tub-thumping; I think you can say a lot more if you do it with a sprinkling of humour."

One of the things Littlewood captures so well is the huge emotional labour that many women routinely put in during the menopause years--caring for children and sometimes elderly parents as well--with their own self-care way down the priority list. "I think all women and girls, but particularly women in their forties and fifties, are held to such high standards of behaviour. That's another thing I wanted to reflect in Grace, this huge emotional burden that she decides to shuck off."

Littlewood's own menopause years have come with challenges too. After falling and breaking her elbow, she experienced medical misogyny after a male orthopaedic consultant dismissed her concerns about bone density decline linked to her age, seemingly panicked by her mention of the word "menopause". She later received a diagnosis of osteopenia, the state of bone deterioration that comes before osteoporosis, "a serious medical condition I could have begun tackling years earlier had my concerns about my own body been taken remotely seriously".

Did she also want to reflect positive aspects of the menopause in her novel? "Well you have a bit more of a 'fuck-it' attitude as you get to this age. And you have all this accrued experience: Christie Watson has talked brilliantly about perimenopause as a 'walking towards wisdom'. Given that we're all going to be working until we're 75, there are a lot of places for that wisdom to go! Many women I know are changing direction and doing different things."

Littlewood's own change of direction--she was a business and financial journalist for the Times, before leaving to travel with her DJ/musician husband, and to raise her three children--came after a part-time MA in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, when she was signed by Janklow & Nesbit agent Hellie Ogden on the strength of a piece she had written during her course. "I pitched to Hellie the idea of a perimenopausal woman going on a rampage and she instantly loved it." Amazing Grace Adams was completed in nine months. Aside from the Michael Joseph deal, the novel has sold in 11 other territories including the US, and TV rights have been optioned by the producer of "Mare of Easttown".

Littlewood is heartened by the movement to open up the discussion around menopause, but remains cautious. "It does feel like we're in a completely different landscape. But how much systemic change will actually take place is still to be seen".

Caroline Sanderson

@carosanderson

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Stage Media Limited
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Sanderson, Caroline. "Littlewood pens tale of Amazing Grace: Fran Littlewood's fiction debut tells of a menopausal 50-year-old woman who refuses to be bound by convention--and it makes for a rollicking read." The Bookseller, no. 5991, 7 Oct. 2022, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A724594692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d10e400f. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Amazing Grace Adams

Fran Littlewood. Holt, $27.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-327028-2

Littlewood debuts with an uneven peri menopause drama centered on the tempestuous relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Grace is 45 and recently separated from her husband, Ben. Once a gifted translator whose skills made her famous on television (the press called her a "ravishing redhead" and a "cunning linguist"), Grace feels adrift in her life, with diminishing professional prospects and a body that feels like it's "drying up from the inside out." She can't believe her daughter, 15-year-old Lotte, has grown from being the baby on her hip to a distant teenager and something of a TikTok sensation. When Grace finds a sexually suggestive note in the pocket of Lotte's blazer, her anxiety skyrockets. Then Grace learns her daughter has been skipping school. As Lotte pulls further away, Grace goes increasingly off-kilter, embarking on a frenzied, disastrous quest to bring Lotte a birthday cake. The novel employs a nonlinear timeline, with some chapters taking place in the early aughts, when Grace and Ben first met at a polyglot competition. Though the plot can feel undercooked, Littlewood easily captures the grief Grace feels at nearing the end of her reproductive years, and the mother-daughter relationship is similarly well drawn. It's a mixed bag, but Littlewood, like her protagonist, consistently finds the right words. (Sept.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"Amazing Grace Adams." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 15, 10 Apr. 2023, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747079999/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c9cbcde. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Littlewood, Fran AMAZING GRACE ADAMS Henry Holt (Fiction None) $27.99 9, 5 ISBN: 9781250857019

A woman walks across London to deliver a birthday cake for her 16-year-old daughter, reliving the joys and tragedies of the previous decades.

Grace Adams is in her mid-40s, late 20s, and mid-30s in this layered novel exploring her past and present relationships with her husband, Ben, and daughter, Lotte. In the present, Grace is trekking across London on a scorching hot day, having abandoned her car to gridlock, refusing to give up on a plan to see a daughter who doesn't want to see her. Simultaneously, we see the Grace of four months ago, a harried, perimenopausal woman convinced she has ruined everything, and the Grace of the earlier 2000s, an award-winning linguist who's landed a lucrative TV gig and has no intention of having children but who becomes a stay-at-home mother in crisis. Ben is a man who has filed for divorce, a harried husband grappling with being a dad to an 8-year-old daughter whose mother has disappeared, and a young Ph.D. student desperate to spend more time with an amazing woman he has just met. Lotte is a 15-turning-16-year-old child-woman doing poorly in school, finding social media fame, and challenging the establishment; a young child who adores her mother; and a growing, not-yet-born baby. The relationships between each pair and among all of them together are complex and layered, and Littlewood confronts the effects that aging and trauma, stress, poor decisions, and memories of overheard and unspoken conversations can have on a person's sense of self and their relationships. The result is simultaneously frank, nuanced, and evocative.

A gripping story of joy, grief, stress, worry, love at first sight, parenting, and trauma.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Littlewood, Fran: AMAZING GRACE ADAMS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A754971871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cf45688b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Fran Littlewood's debut novel, "Amazing Grace Adams," takes readers on a tour of a mother's darkest hour.

AMAZING GRACE ADAMS, by Fran Littlewood

During one light-bulb moment in "Amazing Grace Adams," the title character wonders which of her emotions are real and which are the fault of hormones gone awry. "It's impossible to tell where the perimenopause stops and she begins," writes Fran Littlewood, "and she's asking herself who she would be if it wasn't for those chemical enemies raging through her body, hijacking her mind, who she would be if her self had not come apart from her. She imagines she'd be nailing life, sailing through serenely."

At this point in Littlewood's debut Grace has laid waste to a pharmacy counter display, head-butted a groper on the London tube and used a stolen golf club to attack a stranger's car. Suffice it to say, her hormones have a lot to answer for.

Grace is an accomplished linguist who speaks five languages. She was once a popular television personality - a "Polyglotty Hotty," according to one headline - who introduced viewers to words like Torschlusspanik, roughly translated from German as "gate-shut panic," or "that anxious, claustrophobic feeling that avenues and opportunities are shutting down." Now, at 45, she finds doors slamming in every direction.

Grace's husband has filed for divorce. She has lost both her uninspiring translating job and her "anything-to-get-her-out-of-the-house job" as an assistant French teacher. Her 15-year-old daughter feels increasingly out of control. And always there are those symptoms: the hot flashes, crying jags and bone-deep rage.

We meet Grace when she's sitting and sweating in traffic - until, no longer able to bear it, she abandons her car and walks away. She is desperate to get to her teenager's birthday party across town, hoping to make amends after a fight. Unfortunately, the whole city seems to have conspired to thwart her. As she makes her way, we jump back and forth from Grace's no good, very bad day and the events in her past that have led to it. The effect is of a drawn-out anxiety dream, the kind where you have a flight to catch but can't get to the airport, somehow don't remember where you left your pants ⦠and by the way, has anyone seen the baby?

On her acknowledgments page, Littlewood explains that the book is partly inspired by "Falling Down," the 1993 movie featuring a mad-as-hell Michael Douglas. But Grace Adams is also the latest in a series of brilliant, beautiful and privileged protagonists (Amy Dunne, Bernadette Fox, Barbie) undone by the challenges of modern womanhood. "I don't remember a time when I didn't feel tired," she says, "and there's this dread in me constantly because I have no idea what I'm doing."

Littlewood taps effectively into the fear and confusion of parenting teens, the way a mother can spot an old karate belt in her child's bedroom and suddenly picture it as a noose. An 11th-hour reveal - you may find it moving or manipulative - sheds light on Grace's particular anxieties.

I may be proving the author's point by noting that her central character can be hard to root for. She is not only flipping off the world (and you the reader, via the novel's provocative cover image) but also representing the darkest self-hating thoughts of a certain demographic. She envies her daughter's youth and mourns her own, harping on the "fleshy overhang that encircles her waist" and her face that is "sloping downward, like it's given up." While frank discussion of perimenopause is welcome, Grace's tendency to blame jerk behavior on her middle-aged body is unlikely to lift any stigmas. Try as she might, there is no way to separate your hormones from your true self. It all goes into the soup of being a woman, a task as impossible and amazing at 15 as it is on the cusp of 50.

Sara Austin is the executive editor of Elle.

AMAZING GRACE ADAMS | By Fran Littlewood | 272 pp. | Henry Holt & Company | $27.99

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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Eleanor Dalkner FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 International Herald Tribune
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Austin, Sara. "Welcome to Sweaty, Angry Midlife. Here's Your Sullen Teenager!" International New York Times, 8 Sept. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A763753315/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d98a376c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

The Accidental Favorite

Fran Littlewood. Holt, $29.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-85711-8

Tensions flare during an English family's vacation in the countryside in Littlewood's emotive sophomore outing (after Amazing Grace Adams). The action begins with a falling tree, when Patrick Fisher rushes past his two older grown daughters, Alex and Nancy, to save their younger sister, Eva--who is least in danger. Alex, the eldest at 45, resents her husband, Luc, who doesn't pitch in enough with their three children. She obsessively lurks on social media for updates on her first boyfriend, Matt, whom she hasn't seen in decades, and struggles with not having lived up to her potential after being deemed the smart one by her parents. Nancy, 44, worries that her childhood reputation as the family screwup will reemerge if she tells them she's been suspended from her doctor job following a clash with a patient. Eva, a child model turned savvy businesswoman at 40, is anxious about the family discovering her recent secret marriage to Scott, whom her parents and siblings think is a gold digger. Some of the action is a bit stagey, but the sisters' bitterness, judgments, and rivalries feel all too genuine, and the story shifts effortlessly between the present and the sisters' childhoods, culminating in the revelation of a secret that explains Patrick's behavior. The author's fans will find much to love. (June)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Accidental Favorite." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 14, 7 Apr. 2025, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835360868/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1bb70c2a. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

The Accidental Favorite. By Fran Littlewood. June 2025. 320p. Holt, $29.99 (9781250857118); e-book (9781250857125).

A British family gathers for matriarch Vivienne's seventieth birthday in an all-glass house in the countryside. When a tree falls, Patrick, Vivienne's husband and father to Alex, Nancy, and Eva, rushes to save only one of his daughters. Everyone is fine, but his actions set off a series of events that threaten to unravel this successful family. Alex is struggling with her surprise third baby and getting little help from her husband. Wealthy Eva, who is treating the family to this vacation, is hiding the fact that she married her annoying boyfriend, meaning his odious son is now part of the family. And Nancy is dealing with professional troubles while her beloved daughter is far away with her father. Littlewood (Amazing Grace Adams, 2023) again has her finger on the pulse of the woman on the edge, balancing an impressive cast of characters and flashbacks to the girls' upbringing, slowly revealing the sources of the familial tension. As the house fills with a mysterious odor (it's a metaphor), readers will gladly go along on this wild ride.--Susan Maguire

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Maguire, Susan. "The Accidental Favorite." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f19b1276. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Littlewood, Fran THE ACCIDENTAL FAVORITE Henry Holt (Fiction None) $29.99 6, 24 ISBN: 9781250857118

What happens to three adult sisters when they suddenly find out their father has a favorite?

The Fisher sisters--Alex, Nancy, and Eva--know everything about each other. Or maybe they know nothing. When they gather with their parents, Vivienne and Patrick, and some of their kids and significant others at a posh glass-walled vacation house in the British countryside, everything breaks down. Watching the sisters sort out their lives and put them back together is at the heart of this warm, funny, insightful novel. The book kicks off with what seems to be a near-disaster: As Patrick is taking photos of the sisters outdoors, a tree behind them starts to fall. In a moment, he rushes past Alex and Nancy to pull Eva out of danger. It's shocking--like most parents, Patrick and Vivienne have always said they don't have a favorite child. But it seems he does. Worse, the family doesn't get to hash it out in private, because Eva's teenage daughter Lucy caught the rescue on video, and of course it goes viral. The near miss turns out to be a disaster after all, cracking open the pleasant surfaces of the sisters' lives. Alex, the oldest, has just had her third child at 45, and she's struggling with exhaustion, with her stale marriage, and with a secret obsession with her first love, whom she stalks on social media like a teenager. Nancy, the middle sister, is frazzled by her job as a radiologist and by sharing custody of her young daughter, Georgie, with her jerk of an ex. Eva is the youngest and by far the richest; she invented a board game for her kid that turned into a bestseller. The vacation house is her treat, but money doesn't solve everything. The narrative line is complex, moving back and forth in time and among the sisters and their mother, but Littlewood handles it skillfully. Her characters, flawed as they are, are engaging and relatable, and her sense of family dynamics captures all the old wounds, shifting hierarchies, inside jokes, and sturdy if skewed love the sisters share.

Even under pressure, sisterhood is powerful in this entertaining and well-crafted novel.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Littlewood, Fran: THE ACCIDENTAL FAVORITE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=759849c0. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Sanderson, Caroline. "Littlewood pens tale of Amazing Grace: Fran Littlewood's fiction debut tells of a menopausal 50-year-old woman who refuses to be bound by convention--and it makes for a rollicking read." The Bookseller, no. 5991, 7 Oct. 2022, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A724594692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d10e400f. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Amazing Grace Adams." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 15, 10 Apr. 2023, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747079999/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c9cbcde. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Littlewood, Fran: AMAZING GRACE ADAMS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A754971871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cf45688b. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Austin, Sara. "Welcome to Sweaty, Angry Midlife. Here's Your Sullen Teenager!" International New York Times, 8 Sept. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A763753315/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d98a376c. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "The Accidental Favorite." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 14, 7 Apr. 2025, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835360868/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1bb70c2a. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. Maguire, Susan. "The Accidental Favorite." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f19b1276. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. "Littlewood, Fran: THE ACCIDENTAL FAVORITE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=759849c0. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

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