"O" The Oprah Magazine, August 2004
Wearing a crotch-length leather mini-skirt, June Angel Host, the adolescent narrator of Maureen McCoy's novel Junebug (Leapfrog Press), jumps into the erotic oblivion of her boyfriend Floren's kelly green Eldorado and takes us on a wild ride to the prison where her charismatic mother, Tess, serves a life sentence for murder and to the mid-western household where her fumbling New Age foster mom, Gloria, reads tarot cards and tries to decipher the mysteries of parenthood. McCoy's swift, edgy prose mirrors the impatient longings of a child-woman's heart.

The New York Times Book Review, Chronicle: "Tough Girl" fiction, Sunday, August 22 reviewed by Choire Sicha
"You're lucky and mean," screams a nicey-nice neighbor girl as Junebug Host is acting out her own personal psychodrama in a small Nebraska town. "It's not fair." The 17-year old heroine of Maureen McCoy's Junebug (Leapfrog, paper, $14.95) has been to visit her mother in prison every Sunday for a dozen years. Unfortunately, on this particular Sunday (which happens also to be Mother's Day), Junebug's killer mom has confessed the back story—she found little Junebug down at the trailer park smelling of run, with her panties down around her ankles, so she axed the man who'd been handling her day care.

No wonder Junebug has an extreme approach to life. ("Jesus was the first known alien invader… He went on back to his base after messing around on earth… He quit. What's so holy about that?") Not much happens in the novel—no fakey made-up grandness, just Junebug assimilating mom's damaging info amid her own pop-rock fizzle of adolescence (while engaging in a little self-mutilation on the side). Finally, when her psyche spazzees, Junebug jumps into life. And even though she goes extreme, there aren't many consequences. Bad girls, evidently, are now allowed to escape unpunished.

The Southwest Review, winter 2005, vol. 4, no 1 reviewed by Sheila Cowing
Seventeen year-old Junebug says she has been raised without parents, because her mother has been in prison and "the father was just a sperm." She has been visiting her mother every Saturday in Ellisville Reformatory for Women since she was five years old, when her mother Tess left her in the bathtub and axed a neighbor to death.

After Junebug's graduation from high school, Tess suddenly reveals the motive for the murder: a presumed child molestation which Junebug knows never occurred. This information spurs Junebug to work for her mother's release.

Set in western Nebraska, a land of lonely prairies seldom described in contemporary fiction, McCoy (a part-time Taos resident who has written three other novels set in the midwest) features several unusually well-drawn female characters. Junebug grows up with Gloria, her guardian, a big, caring woman who wears African caftans and believes in galactic heritage, and Bob, who sells sausage-casings throughout the Midwestern states.

Gloria and Junebug talk intimately over sherry and Girl Scout chocolate-mint cookies; for Junebug, the smell of sherry will always remind her of "earnestness, cover-up and restraint." Gloria talks about mother love, positions groups of candles according to room energy, hangs crystal light catchers and gives Junebug special amulets to carry, such as a Peruvian vial filled with dark liquid, a rolled condor plume and seeds which will ward off evil and attract health and money. Junebug is to imagine nobility and grace, because these, Gloria tells her, are qualities her mother Tess possesses.

The denouement of the novel is great fun, for indeed, Junebug finagles the jail guards and walks out into the hot sunshine holding her mother's hand. In the small prison community, Junebug has known the guards since she was very young. By the end of the novel, the reader knows Tess, the jail guard, Junebug and Gloria well, also.

Hartford Courant, August 8, 2004 reviewed by Carole Goldberg
No one would ever confuse Willimantic, in eastern Connecticut, or the town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod with the publishing behemoth of Manhattan. But in these out-of-the-way places and in similar towns across the country, small presses, with unflagging determination and considerable gumption, publish worthy books the giant houses routinely overlook or fail to promote. Leapfrog Press in Wellfleet, run by writer Ira Wood and his wife, the poet and novelist Marge Piercy, is one such outfit. Since 1986, Leapfrog has been bringing out books and CDs of fiction, poetry and nonfiction of the kind often dismissed as "mid-list," but which Leapfrog calls "the heart and soul of literature.

"In recent years it has published, among others, Paradise Dance by Cape Cod writer Michael Lee, a fine collection of New England-based short stories that range from the wry to the hilarious to the genuinely poignant. Another Leapfrog book is Theodore Roszak's The Devil and Daniel Silverman, "a smartly satirical novel about a liberal-minded gay man on the campus of an ultra-conservative college. This summer's offering from Leapfrog, is Junebug, the fourth novel by Maureen McCoy, who teaches at Cornell University.

The story is told with huge helpings of irony and passion, by 17-year-old Junebug Angel Host, who has pretty much been raising herself since age 5, when her mother, the stunningly beautiful Tess, committed a notorious crime. An ax murder, actually. But Tess had her reasons.

Though she is now a permanent resident of a Nebraska women's reformatory known as "Ladylock"—"as if little purses were clicking shut on the dainty problems of prisonette life, now excuse us, please," Junebug scoffs—Tess calls herself "the most stable mother in America."

Well, Junebug certainly knows where her mom can always be found, and visits her every Saturday in the drab prison, where Tess's presence "was like weather spirited into that room, pure heat and light." Junebug's mission is to get Tess out of prison and back into her life. But first she has to figure out what her life should be about. Missions impossible, it seems.

The book, which some have compared to White Oleander and others to The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, is a searching exploration of adolescent angst and anger, told with an almost overwhelming lyrical intensity.