Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar – Katie Yee

Published By: Brazen
Pages: 224
Released On: 24/07/2025

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.

A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak-it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.

Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture-and to maybe save herself in the process.

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Brazen for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

This has been on my wishlist for so long! I am happy to say it was just as a fabulous as I had hoped it would be.

It’s so easy to read, and such fun. Yes I know there’s depressing elements to it but still, I just found it so joyful to read. It’s a relatively short book and quick to read, I read it in a few hours.

I docked half a star because it is just one long text, no chapters, and I really dislike long chapters, let alone just one book-long chapter. But I’m aware that is a personal choice.

I do have a slight issue with the characters. As characters go, they’re fine, interesting, very real. But they all felt like they lacking something, a bit of emotion or anything. The anger, sadness, confusion…it was all a bit tepid and I’d have liked that to have been hyped up a bit more.

I read one review that said because the author is young, she didn’t have quite the level of experience to give justice to the topics in the story. And whilst I understand what they meant, I think that’s quite a narrow way of thinking. You don’t necessarily have to experience something in order to write about it. I think Katie has done a wonderful job at observing everything, from the mundane and everyday to the extraordinary

I believe this is her debut and it’s definitely a promising start.