A Review of Hallie Elizabeth Newton's "Agnes Lives!"

Bloomsbury | 781639738564 | 256 pages | June 23, 2026

It’s 6:30 am in New York City, and Agnes is filled with lip injector and toxic optimism for

her day. She’s a SoulCycle devotee, an ideal girlfriend for her novelist partner Nathan, and a writer for an “anti-fashion” magazine called Whorl, a superior version of W. Over the course of twenty-four hours, her internal monologue never stops, and her goal is simple enough: Agnes wants someone to kill her. 

Like a feminist After Hours, Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s debut novel is an uproarious ride through 2014 New York, a one-day crash course in a deceptively unremarkable year. For Agnes, her death wish is not a negative but a fulfillment of purpose, healthier than a suicide because of its widening of her life’s meaning: “I’m so slight that I easily disappear. Talk over me at intermission. Ask me to step aside in photos. But today it is different. I’m larger than myself, very big, man-size, while the earth is so small that I can feel its spherical curve.”

In fact, the main issue for Agnes is not whether to die but how to find a suitable killer. “I’m trying to send a message to someone, but it’s tricky because I don’t know the person. They have to see the outfit and say, ‘I can help her.’” Agnes agonizes over her appearance, selecting the perfect bag like she does the perfect murder weapon, hoping to make her killer’s task easy by supplying the knife or gun herself. Agnes aims to please, and all she asks in exchange is the sweet kiss of death before the day is over.

Among Agnes’s killer candidates is her boyfriend Nathan, whose work as a writer is so important that he barely leaves the bed and won’tcan’t go see a movie with Agnes, despite the fact that she’s bought tickets for multiple films at various showtimes in different parts of the city in case he can make any one of them. Agnes shrinks herself for Nathan, to the point of becoming invisible to him: “Like in fairytales when the end of the story is just the lovers riding away, my life was over the moment we met.” But Nathan’s nonpresence makes him ill-suited to be a girlfriend killer, though Agnes takes the blame for that, too, at one point texting him an apology for trying to be his victim and “ruining our sanctuary.”

Aside from her boss at Whorl, who fires Agnes after she tries to turn a letter opener into a murder weapon against herself, all of Agnes’s candidates for killing her are men: ex-boyfriends, hookups, men who follow her on Instagram. That they aren’t fit for the job is just one more thing Agnes takes responsibility for: “I didn’t mean to hurt these men. I wanted them to help me.” 

On the surface, Newton doesn’t seem concerned with Agnes’s reasons for wanting to die, instead allowing Agnes to treat it as a given. At times, her suicidal ideation peeks through her running monologue: “I don’t like getting older. I don’t like knowing more than I did before. I don’t like having learned about life.” But even these moments seem like vague gestures at something deeper, an impulse buried beneath layers of humor and increasingly bizarre scenarios.

The key to Agnes Lives! lies in its setting, the apparent randomness of setting the novel in 2014. During a scene in a Tesla, Agnes remarks on Elon Musk as an environmentalist, assuming him to care about others. At another point, crucially, Agnes remembers the way a man humiliated her and wonders, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was some kind of national movement where people could ruin a man’s career over the way he treated a woman?” 

Three years before #MeToo became a global reckoning, Agnes feels alone in her experiences. Despite the novel’s incessantly funny POV, a serious thesis emerges in Newton’s deft hands. Alongside the run-of-the-mill mistreatment that she endures, Agnes reveals multiple instances of sexual assault, each time trying to downplay them as somehow not as bad as they were. The same way she makes herself small for her boyfriend, Agnes shrinks herself in the face of every traumatic experience that befalls her. Unable to confront that she may have been someone else’s victim, Agnes instead tries to victimize herself in the most literal fashion. 

In the novel’s denouement, Newton makes a subtle shift in Agnes’s view of events: “Why do they all want to hurt me but not kill me and then do what they always want to do?” In a world where men get away with all kinds of abuse, Agnes wants to extend this evil logic to its seemingly natural conclusion: why not just kill her?

There were times towards the end of Agnes Lives! when my sympathy for Agnes waned, particularly when Newton incorporates references to the growing Black Lives Matter movement. While begging to be killed, Agnes encounters the police, but her mention of police brutality feels slight, a narrator coming up against the limits of her author’s premise. The novel’s setting, on September 13, 2014, takes place just two months after New York police officers killed Eric Garner. 

From this vantage, the novel’s balance of humor and sociopolitical commentary begin to falter. The gender-based trauma that leads Agnes to suicidal ideation isn’t negated by the parallel realities of police brutality, though her gallows humor about her own experiences of sexual assault and everyday misogyny may not translate to, say, a person of color deciding how to navigate their own experiences of anti-Black violence, or how a woman of color in particular would approach police officers in the same scenario. This troubles not Agnes’s wish to be killed, but the broader application of her perspective. 

Staying with Agnes on her journey, her singular voice enraptured me. Zooming out, I wondered about how individual stories don’t always read the same among others. Still, in Agnes Lives! Newton provides an audience to a woman who is a few years away from joining a larger chorus in the #MeToo movement. If she can make it through this night, will it be enough to see tomorrow through?

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About the Book Critic

Ben Lewellyn-Taylor lives in Chicago with his wife, Meg. Ben is a graduate of the Antioch University MFA program in creative nonfiction. His writing can be found at benlewellyntaylor.com.