Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.
The author of a smart, tart series of political novels—most recently Landfall (2019)—casts an equally well-informed, unromantic eye on the entertainment industry and its closeted gay denizens.
Once a moderately successful actor, then a shady antiques dealer, Dick Kallman is dead when the novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980. Narrator Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist and intermittent friend, recalls the strained dinner party Dick threw on the night of his murder, interrupted by the arrival of a supposed client who in retrospect is a glaring suspect. (Kallman’s career and death are factual; the circumstances of his murder are bent to fictional use.) Matt then flashes back to 1951, when he was pianist for the musical Seventeen, Dick had a supporting role, and both were smitten by leading man Kenneth Nelson (among the many real-life show-biz figures who make appearances). Dick’s crush proves to be a lifelong obsession as chapters alternate with mechanical regularity between the rise and fall of Dick’s career and the grim aftermath of his death. The crime brings love to Matt in the person of much younger Devin Arroyo, a former hustler now working at the police precinct, and their sweet romance provides a welcome respite from Mallon’s depressingly accurate portrayal of life on show business’s striving fringes. From landing a promising spot in Lucille Ball’s television empire, through decent gigs as the lead in Broadway touring companies, to a one-season television flop, Dick always finds that his embarrassingly obvious scheming ends up thwarting his naked ambition. He stops getting work by the 1970s, he admits to himself, “because nobody, at least nobody that knew him, liked him.” Dick’s personality is skin-crawlingly plausible, but that makes it hard to feel sorry for him, even as Mallon acidly limns the ridiculous games gay actors were forced to play—dates with “beards,” fake engagements—in those pre-Stonewall days. The novel’s tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick’s unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true.
Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748197
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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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