A pulpy, imperfect sendup of moviemaking.
An American actor attempts to survive a chaotic South American movie shoot in Litchfield’s novel.
Dominic Graves’ career in Hollywood is not going as he’d hoped. The actor is now in his 30s, and good roles are hardly rolling in. (His most recent job was an ad for a car dealership.) When his disreputable agent Bernie Finkelman offers him the lead in a Uruguayan thriller, Dominic has little choice but to say yes and fly off for the 10-week shoot in Montevideo. There, the problems begin almost immediately. By the time he makes it to his first day of shooting—hungover and several hours late—he’s already slept with his gorgeous coworker, Sofía Prodova, and insulted her enough for her to beat him unconscious with an ashtray. Dominic then has to survive long days under the whip of the demanding and volatile director Ignacio Martinez, who is happy to put his actors in danger if it results in a better shot. “Death on a film set often turns a decent performance into a legendary one,” he tells Dominic ominously. Ignacio has his own longstanding and explosive relationship with Sofía, one that Dominic will have to navigate if he wants to end up in the final cut of A Bullet for Silver Face. (That is, assuming Dominic doesn’t actually have to take any bullets to his face.) Litchfield writes with sardonic vigor, capturing Dominic’s general distaste for his situation: “Bullets, explosions and bare-knuckle fistfights were continual, disconcerting distractions, and trying to remember lines while worried about being blown to smithereens was an eternal challenge.” But the reader struggles to sympathize with Dominic, who pours whiskey into his morning coffee and surprises his one-night stands with unwanted sexual maneuvers that make him feel powerful. The fact that all three of the main characters are both charmless and irredeemable keeps the book from being as funny—or as suspenseful—as Litchfield might have intended.
A pulpy, imperfect sendup of moviemaking.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781732332867
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Lowestoft Chronicle Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2025
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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