An ambitious, acerbic, entertaining take on the film business.
This hard-edged debut looks at the power, savvy, and ugliness that go into making movies.
Nelson, an actor and playwright who has also written, directed, and produced films, deploys an insider’s knowledge of Hollywood in this story of one director being sought for two productions. In 2019, David Levit gets the call to helm the movie Coal, a prestige project, but he’ll have to deal with Jacob Rosenthal, a powerful producer known for his savage tongue and mania for control. He calls to mind the Kevin Spacey character in Swimming With Sharks. The bigger hitch is that Levit is still under contract to a producer named Brad Shlansky on a shoot that closed down for lack of money. Shlansky, a kind of Rosenthal manqué desperate for clout and respect, won’t release Levit to work on Coal. The novel’s fourth major player is Paul Aiello, a brash agent who knew Shlansky in school and now represents him while juggling a sex life increasingly marked by abusive behavior. Nelson delays the inevitable showdown by providing extensive backstories that help populate the 2019 Hollywood sections with strong characters and motives. He also flags the #MeToo movement with Aiello’s extracurriculars and a character closely drawn from Harvey Weinstein while touching on inclusiveness for people of color and women in filmmaking. The book itself is heavily male and White, but Nelson offers a few strong women, including an amusing older lawyer as verbally aggressive as Rosenthal. One of the book’s pleasures are the rants, including one from the Weinstein character that begins in classic style: "Do you have any idea what I can do to you?" Nelson is a solid writer whose dialogue is smart, pacy, and pointed. The roman à clef elements may go well beyond Weinstein—Levit seems to reflect a good bit of Nelson himself—but the novel works without such extras.
An ambitious, acerbic, entertaining take on the film business.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-951213-65-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Unnamed Press
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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