Everyone kept telling me this was a feel-good buddy adventure, and I kept putting it off because honestly? That description sounded a little too cute. Like it might be one of those books that tries so hard to be charming it forgets to actually say anything. I was wrong. I was sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room — Sophie had her two-year checkup, Lucas was licking the fish tank glass, and I had one earbud in — when Margery Benson smashed a boy over the head with a plate of liver and I thought, okay, we're doing this.
Two Women Who Have No Business Being Friends (And That's the Whole Point)
Margery is stiff, prickly, enormous (the book keeps reminding you), and has been shrinking herself into a life she never wanted since a devastating childhood loss involving her father and a collection of beetles. Enid Pretty shows up in pom-pom sandals and a pink suit that's practically a character itself, all lipstick and optimism and secrets she's clearly running from. The setup sounds like a formula — odd couple goes on adventure, hijinks ensue — but Rachel Joyce does something sneaky here. She lets you laugh at these two for a while, gets you comfortable, and then starts pulling threads that genuinely hurt.
Margery's backstory unfolds in these little gut-punch reveals. Her brothers. The war. The way the world just... decided she didn't matter. And Enid, who seems like comic relief at first, turns out to be carrying her own weight that the pink suit can't hide. Their friendship doesn't happen in some big movie moment. It's built from shared seasickness and jungle mud and the kind of stubbornness that only two women who've been underestimated their whole lives can muster. The Last Romantics gave me that same feeling — women holding each other up through things that would have broken them alone, and the friendship mattering more than any plot point around it.
I'll say this: around the middle stretch, when they're dealing with a certain male character who's following them — it does drag a bit. That subplot felt like it belonged in a different, more thriller-ish book. I get why it's there structurally, but some of those scenes had me checking how much time was left in the chapter. Not a dealbreaker, but noticeable.
Juliet Stevenson Made Me Forget I Was Listening to One Person
Okay, I've listened to a lot of audiobooks narrated by people who are "good at accents" and it usually means they can do three voices that all sound like they're auditioning for a BBC sketch show. Juliet Stevenson is playing a completely different game. Her Margery is low, clipped, guarded — you can hear this woman clenching her jaw through every social interaction. Her Enid is breathless and bright but with this edge of desperation underneath, especially as the story goes on and you start realizing Enid's cheerfulness is strategic. She even makes the minor characters distinct — the French missionary, the various men who keep underestimating them — without ever going cartoonish.
The pacing of her delivery is what really got me, though. She knows exactly when to slow down for the emotional beats and when to keep things moving during the expedition scenes. At 1.25x she still sounded natural, which is my personal gold standard for a narrator. (Some narrators at 1.25x sound like auctioneers. Stevenson just sounds like a slightly more efficient British woman.)
The Ending Did the Thing I Asked It Not to Do
I specifically said I didn't want to ugly-cry at school pickup. Reader, I ugly-cried at school pickup. But here's the thing — it earned it. The ending isn't sad exactly, it's just so full of everything these two women went through and what they became to each other that it hit me right in the chest. I sat in the carpool line with my sunglasses on pretending I had allergies and Emma got in the car and said "Mommy, your face is red" and I said "pollen" and she said "it's October" and — anyway. Made me cry at school pickup. Worth it though.
The beetle itself — whether it exists, what it represents, the actual moment of the search — I won't spoil it. But Joyce makes you care about a bug you've never heard of, which is honestly an achievement on par with getting a toddler to eat broccoli. That same trick — making you ache over something small and symbolic that you'd normally walk right past — is what The Secret Garden does with a locked door and a patch of dirt, and it wrecked me in a similar quiet way.
If Harold Fry Was Your Thing, But You Wanted More Heart and More Mess
I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry years ago and liked it fine but felt a little emotionally held at arm's length. Miss Benson's Beetle has that same Rachel Joyce DNA — quiet person does big unexpected thing — but it's warmer, funnier, and messier. The female friendship here has a specificity that Harold Fry's solo journey didn't. These two women need each other in ways that are embarrassing and inconvenient and real.
Survived 47 pauses and still made sense. That's not nothing for a 12-hour book with multiple timelines and a setting halfway across the world. My book club will love this (if I ever have time for book club again).
Who should grab this: Anyone who loved Where'd You Go, Bernadette or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Moms who need a story about women being brave and ridiculous and alive. Audiobook listeners who appreciate a narrator who's actually performing, not just reading.
Who might want to skip: If you need constant plot momentum, the middle section might test you. And there's a brief mention of animal cruelty that caught me off guard — just a heads up if that's a hard no for you.
