A lively, funny journey on the fringes of Hollywood.
Mathews offers a sardonic novel-in-stories about life in the world of screenwriting.
When readers first meet Dale Davis, it’s 1988, and he’s written the script for a movie that’s shooting in Nicaragua. When the producers fire the director, Dale steps in to helm the film. It’s a dicey place to shoot a movie, to say the least; interference (both from Sandinista officials and the Reagan administration) looms large over the project. The following chapters, set up like short stories, follow Dale’s Hollywood career as a writer. In “Quality of Life,” which takes place in 2007, he’s drinking in a parked car, and his resulting confrontation with Los Angeles police is interrupted by some local characters, including a sex worker who has “one customer who pays with his dead mother’s weird and outdated prescriptions.” In “Hollywoodski,” Dale day-drinks with other writers who quote movie lines to one another. They’re not to be confused with failed writers, however: “Movie and television writers don’t fail—it is impossible to fail; the bar is set too low. We fade.” “Individual Medley” is framed as a short story about a swimmer that Dale wrote in 1981. This leads to “Oscar,” in which Dale explains how a short film based on “Individual Medley”won an Academy Award. The Oscar statuette, which Dale did not receive, winds up having a cursed reputation. By 2012, in “Payday,” Dale has been married four times, struggles to make ends meet, and hasn’t had a screen credit in 15 years. Nevertheless, due to the vagaries of the industry, he may have a large paycheck coming his way.
Dale’s journey is playful, nuanced, humorous, and peppered with many memorable lines, as when one of his friends tries to sell a snarky T-shirt at “Libertarian Conventions and Ayn Rand Worship Gatherings. Not a lot of humor among those crowds.” At one point, when the door to the bar where Dale hangs out is opened during the day, the narration notes how “the shocking white light blasts in on the shrinking mole people.” An absurdist short story by Dale featuring Philip K. Dick has the SF author commenting, “I do not trust the Post Office, but I trust their habits and their odors.” It all amounts to an expansive, cynical journey through the oddities of showbiz from a constantly struggling writer’s perspective. “Limbo Time,” about the famously odd TV show My Mother the Car, is not quite as poignant as some of the other sections; in it, the show’s writers must figure out where the mother’s voice will come from in the car that her son drives. The fact that this “ludicrous idea for a show, that should have died a deserved death, made it to a full season” may be noteworthy, but the imagined internal discussions are less so. By the end, though, readers will come to laugh at, empathize with, and at least somewhat understand the protagonist’s peculiar world. After all, writers like Dale traffic in the stuff that dreams are made of.
A lively, funny journey on the fringes of Hollywood.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781684429813
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tiger Van Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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