Helping Reluctant Readers

Can We Win Back the Generation That Has Stopped Reading?

This debut novel has an ambition that hopes to go well beyond its story. Murder, Great for My Social Skills is a young adult murder mystery set in Co. Cork, written specifically to address one of the most pressing challenges facing reading culture today: the dramatic fall-off in young readership.

On the surface, this is a fast-paced, humorous whodunnit. At its heart, it is an attempt to put a book back in the hands of those teenagers who have put books down.

There has been a dramatic drop-off in reading for pleasure among teenagers, with screen time eroding their capacity to sit with just words on a page. The attention span required to follow a novel, to hold characters in your mind across chapters, to feel tension build over pages rather than seconds: these skills are being lost.

I know this problem intimately, because I lived it at my own kitchen table. My daughter was twelve and a ‘reluctant reader’. Watching her disengage from books — while remaining hooked on her phone — was the spark that drove me to write this novel. I asked her: what kind of story would make her actually want to read? The answer, it turned out, was one set in a world she recognises. One with characters who talk the way her friends talk, who worry about the things she worries about, who live in the same countryside she sees through the car window every day. Murder, Great for My Social Skills was written for her, and for every young person like her.

What draws a reluctant teenager into a book? A setting they actually recognise, characters who sound like their friends, worry about the same things they worry about, and navigate the same landscape they pass through every day. Locally-set fiction with genuinely relatable characters is one of the most powerful tools we have for re-engaging young readers — and it is a tool that is still significantly underused in Irish YA publishing.

This novel was also written with TikTok in mind - a reality that must be dealt with. Teenagers today are accustomed to content that moves fast, sounds natural, and holds their attention without asking them to wait. Murder, Great for My Social Skills is built around those same rhythms: short, punchy chapters, dialogue-driven scenes that crackle with the voices of real Irish teenagers, and a plot that never lets up. It is the kind of book that asks very little of a reluctant reader in the first chapter, and makes it very hard for them to stop at the second.

I believe that one good book can change everything. Not because a single novel can undo the pull of TikTok, but because the right story at the right moment can remind a young person what it feels like to be gripped, to be desperate to know what happens next, to choose pages over a screen. Murder, Great for My Social Skills is designed to be that story: fast-paced, funny, tense, and rooted in a world that feels real. If it can hook one reluctant reader, it might just open a door that stays open.

Book versus Phone (and the book won! )

My reluctant reader said she didn't even realise she was reading it. Why? "Entertaining", "Addictive", "Slightly Edgy", "Fast Paced", that's what she said! Now, she still had the phone right beside her, but her eyes were on the paper page and I felt, finally, she's off the screen and doing something worthwhile! "Murder, Great for My Social Skills" worked for me, maybe it will work for you.