REVIEW: The Ballad of Ronan McCoy

Pages: 384 

Format: Hardback 

Publisher: HQ 

Genre: Contemporary 

Release Date: June 18th 2026

Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else does: about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around. 

Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own skin: all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. 

Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him.

I had the opportunity to read this book at the end of last year, but it’s taken me a long time to put my thoughts into words because this story is just so beautiful whilst also bringing up my own memories of losing someone I loved.

The Ballad of Ronan McCoy hits us with some uncomfortable truths. We, as humans, are admittedly self-righteous, and probably think we’d be perfectly accommodating if a close friend suddenly found themselves with a life-altering disability. The reality is always different from the idealistic scenario we create in our heads, though. The process of Brendan learning to cope with his world being turned upside down after Ronan’s accident was as interesting to read as it was heartbreaking because it made me question how I’d react in his situation.

The highlight of this story for me was the way it handled grief. Since losing my dad, I’ve been searching for books about loss and the different ways people learn to live with their grief, and this is easily one of the books that I’ve related to the most. Colin writes grief in a way that tugged on the loose strings of my own painful memories. There was a specific scene in which Brendan was grating cheese to eat something for the first time after getting home from the hospital, and it felt like a punch to the gut because I vividly remembered making cheese crackers in my kitchen after losing my dad. I knew I had to eat something, but I just didn’t know what. Brendan’s raw emotions in that moment called out to me in a way I wasn’t expecting.  

The only tiny issue I had with the story was the growing romance between Brendan and his schoolmate, Jennifer. It lacked depth for me and ended up feeling like it was included simply to have a romantic relationship within the book. We didn’t truly get to see them fall for each other? We were simply told that it had happened. It just didn’t feel as believable as I wanted it to, but I loved Jennifer as a character and wish we could have gotten to know her a bit more. 

This was such a gorgeous debut and I’m very much looking forward to whatever story Colin conjures up next. You can truly tell how much heart and soul has been poured into this book, and it was such a joy to read a story with an authentic Irish voice. A huge thank you to HQ for providing me with a copy to review.