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by some local characters, including a sex worker who has “one customer who pays with his dead mother’s weird and outdated prescriptions.”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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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