A thoughtful and tender exploration of grief and secrets.
In Matthews’ novel, a young Australian man discovers his late cousin’s secret life.
Dan Molina had always been a generous father figure to his 31-year-old cousin, Jamie Barrio, who manages Dan’s collectibles shop. In the wake of Dan’s death, Jamie struggles to adjust to the new reality of his life in Sydney, Australia, without him. Days after the funeral, a lawyer contacts Jamie with Dan’s final gift: a mysterious thumb drive containing hours of audio files. Jamie soon finds that each recording is a spoken letter by Dan, addressed to a mysterious “Ethan” and ending with the salutation “With love, Dad.” Jamie is baffled; is Ethan the child of a secret love affair? Why would Dan want Jamie to find out about it like this? Intrigued, Jamie plunges into the files, which tell the story of his late cousin’s trip to Perth, when abdominal pain landed him in the hospital. “I’ve never been so afraid as I am now,” Dan says, as he explains to the mysterious Ethan that doctors couldn’t determine what was wrong with him. He also tells Ethan about his childhood as a boy who was constantly teased for his weight; his struggles to connect with his own emotionally distant father; how he met Beatrice, his future wife and the love of his life; and how he became a respected consultant. Buried in the family mythology, however, is something deeper and more melancholy: “Was the road I chose the one less travelled by?” Dan asks Ethan, before he speaks of learning about bisexuality and queerness. Jamie soon realizes that these tapes reveal not only the up and downs of Dan’s life, but also deep secrets about his sexuality.
In an introduction, Matthews notes that his novel is based on a true story, and one that he found “instantly intriguing” and “painfully beautiful.” One could describe his book in a similar manner, as it grabs one’s attention from the beginning with several unfolding mysteries. Readers will find themselves asking some of the same questions as Jamie: Who is Ethan, and why did Dan share these communications with Jamie? Matthew smartly layers the narrative with multiple perspectives; alongside Jamie’s and Dan’s points of view is that of Dan’s nurse during his hospital stay, who contributes her own recollections. However, it’s Dan’s mournful, pensive voice that makes the strongest impression. His reflections on family life, especially as the child of immigrants from Uruguay, are filled with engaging observations and heartbreaking moments, whether he’s speaking of how his father continually disappointed him or his own hesitation to give in same-sex attractions. Matthews takes his time getting to the queer aspects of the story, and as a result, some of the earlier passages focused on Dan’s professional life, or his experience of the hospital, feel as if they’re merely stalling for time before bigger reveals. It all leads to a satisfying emotional conclusion, though, which connects to issues involving family, sexuality, and what it means to truly understand a loved one.
A thoughtful and tender exploration of grief and secrets.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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