The Road to Tender Hearts – Annie Hartnett
What better way to enjoy a road trip than by listening to a road trip novel? "The Road to Tender Hearts" came recommended, and for the first two-thirds, I would have passed that recommendation along without hesitation.
At its heart, this is a novel about people learning to live after unimaginable trauma. PJ is still grieving the daughter he lost decades earlier. Oliver and Luna are reeling from the murder-suicide of their parents. Other characters carry addiction, sexual assault, divorce and depression. Oh, and there's a cat (always a bonus), Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with an uncanny ability to predict death.
Despite all that heaviness, Annie Hartnett finds genuine humor in the messiness of being alive. It's less a dark comedy than a morbid one, built on the idea that sometimes laughing is the only way through. For most of the novel, that balance is remarkably successful. PJ is a wonderfully flawed protagonist, Oliver and Luna are surprisingly well drawn for kids in a novel that could easily have used them as props, and the road trip structure gives the whole thing a loose momentum that suits the material.
The problem is that Hartnett doesn't know when to end. This is the literary equivalent of a TV show that produces 90-minute episodes not because the story demands it but because it can. "Hearts" could have ended at least three different times before it actually does — and each time it didn't, the story lost a little more of its impact.
By the final third, we're deep into a pile-up of late-stage revelations: secret siblings, secret cancer, near-arrests, a hit-and-run, a near-alligator attack (I'm not making any of that up). I eventually cranked the audiobook to 2x speed just to find out where it was all headed.
Pancakes is also a problem, which is not a sentence I expected to write. He works as both a running joke and a light metaphor for living in the moment and appreciating what you have. He stops working once Hartnett begins leaning on him as a plot device. A whole hotel full of people dying in his orbit probably warranted more alarm than any character in this novel seemed to feel. And when Oliver dangles him over a mall balcony to threaten his sister, only for a security guard to slip on a wet floor, crack his head and die, I genuinely felt the novel jump the shark.
The POV structure — rotating through basically every character, including the animals — is a similar mixed bag. It's fun in theory and occasionally gimmicky in practice. If we're getting Pancakes' perspective, why only sometimes? He's ostensibly in nearly every scene.
What I loved: the first two-thirds, the humor, PJ's big dumb heart and the way Hartnett treats grief as something that makes people ridiculous rather than noble.
What I didn't: the last third, which traded the novel's genuine highs for increasingly elaborate plot twists and escalating slapstick.
Mark Bramhall's narration is an asset throughout, pairing deadpan delivery with real emotion underneath. He was equally convincing as PJ, Luna and Oliver. If this brand of morbid upmarket fiction appeals to you, audio is definitely the way to go.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (personal library)
Date read: July 4, 2026
Multi-tasking: Fine for the first two-thirds. By the last third you may find yourself, as I did, cranking up the speed just to get to the end.
