I enjoyed reading The Mythmakers, a debut novel by journalist Keziah Weir. It is well written and easy to read. Although it consists of almost 370 written pages, it never drags or becomes boring. It kept my interest intact until the very end, and although I’m usually pretty good at foreshadowing endings, this book’s took me by surprise, and I smiled at the ironies it revealed.

The book is written from the different perspectives of its main two characters, Moira, the recent widow of an acclaimed novelist, and Salal, a young journalist seeking to write a story about the novelist and the manuscript he was working on when he died. Many chapters also are written from the author’s point of view, that of his best friend, and of his daughter. There even are a couple of chapters written in the voice of the author’s first wife. As the journalist becomes more intimate with the widow and then his friend and learns intimate details about the author’s life, the story she seeks to write changes and morphs in innumerable ways. The novel is a story of love, friendship, science, art, jealousy and betrayal. It caused me to think about a multitude of issues on several levels.

As a debut novel, I found The Mythmakers to be engaging and well written, and I am excited to read more from the talented author Keziah Weir. I was given an advanced, digital copy of the manuscript to read from NetGalley, and I am grateful to NetGalley, Ms. Weir, and the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, for the opportunity to read and enjoy this digital draft. This review is VOLUNTARY.

I found the premise very interesting, but I struggled to feel connected to any of the characters. This reads like a character study, which would be fine, except I expected much more than that. The story, for lack of a better word, meanders. I lost track of the plot barely a quarter in, and I'm not sure it was ever found. Weir's prose is beautiful, and I'll expect great things of them later in their career, but this novel was underwhelming.

I enjoyed this book, but it also felt a little pointless. The central mystery of the story wasn't really compelling to me and upon scrutiny it seems like a flimsy plot arc to base a novel around. However, I did like the writing and the main character was interesting to me. I liked her friendship with Moira too.

After Sal experiences an epic career failure and the demise of her relationship with her boyfriend in The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir, she embarks on a quest to find out why she's the alleged focus of an unpublished book by a famous author. Unfortunately, the author passed away, so she's not sure if she will ever find out the reason why she becomes a character in his book after she meets him at a book party. She gives up everything to contact his wife in upstate New York and see if she can get ahold of this manuscript and piece together this mystery, possibly as a pitched magazine story.

I added this book to my TBR list because I've been reading this author's pieces in Vanity Fair, Elle, and other magazines for several years. I wanted to see how her writing translated into an entire novel. The writing is amazing without being pretentious, and I definitely want to see what's next. But the book did not wow me.

The book has an amazing premise, but I didn't feel the emphasis on it or even get the fruition of it. You start out learning about Sal's mistakes in her career and somewhat about her relationship, but the focus shifts to the wife of the author and her life. As another reviewer said, this presents more character studies than plot. That would be okay, but some of the characters didn't feel that interesting or intriguing. Frankly, Sal's meeting with Sawyer, a person she meets at the local coffee shop, was more entertaining, and I would have liked exploring that character more.

Although there is a twist in this book, I did not see it, and even when it was revealed, I almost missed it and didn't care that much. You're plodding toward it through several chapters and not even realizing it's coming. This could be a good thing if executed well, but this book really isn't centered on the mystery after a while. It's almost like the book is two separate books without a strong tie between them. You almost forget that there's a mystery to be solved with the character histories the author presents.

I cannot say that I didn't like the book, but it's rather slow and, at times, lackluster. I felt it should have been more plot-driven and focused on the mystery or it could have gone with the character-study aspect instead of bringing up the mystery at all. And, sometimes, I could not grasp why the main character acted as she did. There wasn't enough information to justify some of her actions in my opinion.

Talk about an explosive first quarter of a novel! THE MYTHMAKERS starts off insanely strong, with a literary mystery, an intriguing main character, and fast-paced, smooth prose. Once the mystery starts to unravel though, the book becomes more complicated and slow, but it's still a worthwhile read and an incredible debut novel.

Sal reads a story in The Paris Review by a much-older author whom she once met at a party. It seems like this story is about her, and after the shock of that revelation, it is revealed that he recently passed. Therefore, she will never know for sure -- but that doesn't prevent her from still trying to find out.

She heads to northern New York, away from her crumbling relationship and career, to seek out his widow. The story then veers into the widow, the writer, their daughter, and his first wife's life. It takes a lot of meandering turns, but in the end, the book is a lovely surprise with a few fun twists.

Was not the best book I’ve ever read but definitely not the worst. The author writes a story writes a story about her after a short meeting.

This lede is REALLY exciting, and for most of the first third of the book I was with it. As we traveled deeper into the ouroboros of the story, I started to lose interest, as I began to lose the thread of how the story started. But beautiful writing. Worth a try, and I may go back and give it another one.

I enjoyed this fast and explorative read, and witnessing journalist Sal flail and flee her way through the challenges in her personal and professional life. The way she chooses to dive fully into this project and the life of author Martin Keller and a chance encounter that may have been captured in his final, unpublished novel (which she becomes obsessed with finding and reading) felt realistic to me as an escape from her life. I did have some confusion around the meta part of the novel--is the reader eventually reading the story that Sal will publish that shifts to focus on multiple characters? But the ending was satisfying and I'm happy to have invested a summer Saturday into reading this novel.

𝙄 𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙛𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙨𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙠 𝙤𝙛 𝙥𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙞𝙨, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙄 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙩𝙝𝙮 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙠 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙣𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙙𝙖𝙮𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚.

What this novel suggests is that we are all, in our own special way, mythmakers of our narratives. Sal Cannon is a journalist, living on "a quiet, tree-lined block on the south side of Prospect Park" with her successful partner Hugh. The artistic life she envisioned for herself is a far cry from the 'comfortable monotony' they share. While waiting for her piece on an elusive playwright to come out, she reads a short story by Martin Scott Keller, astounded to discover it is about her encounter with the much older author six years ago. She is the man's muse! Here she was living her life while unbeknownst to her, he never forgot her. While writing a pitch for a story on Martin, her work on the playwright comes out and costs Sal her job. What better balm than to plunge herself into the mystery of Martin, intrigued to learn there is more to his story... or as she believes, her story, an actual novel! "𝐴 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑙? 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒? 𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑒?" Deflated to learn that Martin has since passed away, nothing can stop her from tracking down that manuscript. It is a beautiful distraction from the current disasters in her work and love life.

With Hugh needing distance from Sal, she plans a bus trip to Martin’s hometown of Linden. Her plan is to speak with his widow Moira, a seemingly ordinary woman, under the guise of writing about his work. Sal promises not to be intrusive, but the truth is she longs to probe Moira about the manuscript. At times, there is something distasteful about Sal digging into this widow’s world. As the story of their marriage and Martin’s life as a writer unfolds, it goes against what Sal believes to be true. There is a deviation in her original plan, finding herself walking into her own sort of fiction, she cannot deny there is a tale to tell, the details have simply altered what she imagined. All signs confirm to Sal that she is fated to be here, right now, in the lovely town of Linden. She extends her stay.

She discovers that Moira is more than ‘ordinary’, a mystery in her own right, and Sal loves falling into their lives, uncovering the ‘oppositional forces that pulled them towards each other’. Sal’s desires for more information are expanding, and every detail Moira provides illuminates not just Martin, but those he loved and left. Sal is a captive interloper, starving for every morsel she can get, despite the fact that her own life, and Hugh, are fading into the background.

What is random and the things we give significance shape our realities. Moira is anchored and doesn’t believe in hypotheticals, she couldn’t be more different than Sal, chasing the feverish stories she invents in her head, absorbed in Moira’s life rather than dealing with her own. It is intense, Sal needs to talk to other people who knew Martin, like his daughter Caroline, who thinks what Sal is doing is predatory. It is when she searches to find out how Martin first became a writer through meeting with his friend Wesley that she is told the story of Lillian and her importance in Martin’s life. Love, creation, space, misunderstandings, loss, and the mountains we build about ordinary men, this is a novel about the limits of human perception and the futility of 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘧𝘴. Lillian and Moira are the characters I clung to more than Martin or Sal. It wasn’t slow for me; I enjoyed the unraveling of this lovely read.

Published June 13, 2023

Scribner

S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books

Special thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

This book sounded great, but for me went downhill very quickly! I struggled to believe the story that the protagonist believes an author writes a story about her after a short meeting.

Then the story takes a turn and goes quickly downhill from there. I don't understand why I've seen people giving 5 stars for this book. For my own conscience, I can't recommend this book.

This is a book about journalist Sal Cannon written by a real-life senior editor Keziah Weir at Vanity Fair. I'd say she knows something of writers! The book starts of with an interesting premise - Sal has a nice life with her live-together boyfriend Hugh. She profiles a reclusive director, and then one day reads a short story by a man named Martin Keller that is basically about a night years prior when Sal met the author. The story is an excerpt from an unpublished book written about her! She decides to investigate the situation and her life begins to unravel as she pursues those close to Martin to learn more.

For me the treatment of how Sal treated boyfriend Hugh rang pretty unrealistic and made her an unlikable character. The story meanders a lot and utilizes the trope of switching back and forth on time frames. I began to lose sight of the point of Sal pursuing the Martin story and I didn't care as much as I should have about Martin's back story, his wife and daughter. I get this is a narrative about different POVs, but it wasn't a hit for me. Pub date 6/13/23. 368 pages. 2-stars.

Thank you, Scriber, Simon and Schuster, Marysue Rucci Books and NetGalley, for providing an eARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.

@netgalley #mythmakers #netgalley

The Mythmakers is a fascinating and unique novel about Sal, a flailing writer, who encounters a story written about her by a once famous author who is now deceased. She tracks down the author's widow, Moira, who is a septuagenarian astrophysicist, in seek of the unfinished manuscript the story is taken from. Sal is looking to investigate his life, but seems more intrigued by Moira. Illustrating how so often we focus on the lives of famous male writers when their wives may had lead much more interesting lives.

I especially enjoyed the parts about Moira and Lillian and the obstacles they encountered in the 1960-70s as talented, but often underestimated women. I really loved the literary writing style. The author has such wonderful and unique descriptions. It really immersed me into the story. I wasn't sure what where it would lead. The characters are flawed and not always likeable, but they are fascinating, and made me consider how we tell our own stories.

Thank you Scribner and NetGalley for providing this ARC. All thoughts are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley for this great book! The story had many layers and was an excellent read!
The book is about a struggling journalist named Sal, who discovers a short story regarding her meeting the author at a literary event years before. Sal discovers the author is now deceased and the short story is an excerpt from a book. Sal decides to track down the author's widow.
The book is about obsession and how sometimes you throw multiple things away in the process. It was a deep and creative story. I enjoyed the different aspects and I would recommend reading!

Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for this free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Mythmakers is a story about obsession, art, and the way that different relationships can give various enlightening perspectives on the life of a single person. The story starts out being narrated by a journalist looking for more insight on a man (Martin) whose posthumously published work appears to be inspired by their meeting at a party on night years ago. The journalist, Sal, becomes intrigued by Martin's life and searches for more information from his closest relations. The novel explores Martin's life from various points of view.

I thought this book was very well-written and a close character study into Martin and his family. If you like that type of slow, introspective story, definitely pick this up. I just don't think it was for me; if you need some type of action in a story, rather than reflection on affairs in the past, I don't think you need to bother with it.

Sal is at a low point in her life when she comes across a posthumous short story by an author she had briefly met. When she realizes the story is about her encounter with author, she sets on a mission to find out a full manuscript and learn as much as she can about the authors life. In order to do so, Sal slowly inserts herself into the author's widow wife, Moira.

This was definitely a nesting doll of a book, story within a story. The stories revealed interesting parallels and role reversals and I found the characters to be well realized. Weir is definitely a skilled writer. I really liked the ways the themes were done, I enjoyed the way the MC became obsessed with the author's potential obsession about her. While the story seemed a bot aimless at times, I think the ending paid off. I think this would be a good pick for book club discussions.

Thank you so much to Scribner, S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books for the ARC of this one.

The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir is a study in obsession. Sal is a young journalist, whose life is falling down around her. Her relationship is in its last stages, her career is spiraling after a piece she has written is found to be full of inaccuracies. Sal is lost. She happens to stumble upon a short story that she believes is about her and the author, Martin Kellers brief meeting when she was younger. Sal grasps at straws. We are witness to her going down a rabbit hole the likes you have never seen. It is one wild ride.

What fascinated me about this book is its twisty narrative. We see the story through four peoples perspectives; Sal our main character, Martin Keller, the author, Moira his wife and their daughter Caroline, as well as other second tier players. We then moved through various time lines, from current day with Sal, back to the past to uncover Martin and Moira's relationship. The characters were so well written, and complex, the story kept pulling me in. I loved each of the time lines, especially Moiras story, she has a fascinating past. Also, having been born and raised in the Bay Area, I loved when places I knew were mentioned in the story, it added to its enjoyment.

I did have a hard time with the premise of the story, I found Sal's willingness to abandon everything in the search for an elusive story, that may or may not be about her completely baffling, but that may just be a well written character who his filled with flaws. Also, Her ability to insert herself into Moira's life without much protest from Moira also seems unbelievable.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I was compelled to pick it up every day because I was so invested in the people and their stories.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book for an honest review.

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
...
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more. —from 'Ode' by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir is a wonderfully immersive story — the type where the world around me goes gray and unfocused while I'm reading scenes that are vivid and every bit as fixed as the reality I'm steadfastly ignoring.

Sal Cannon, unwittingly on the precipice of rock bottom, starts the novel having just read an excerpt from an unpublished book by Martin Keller, an author she happened to have met some six years prior at a literary gathering of sorts. The magazine-published fictionalized story is about their meeting and a seemingly lasting connection that causes the narrator to contemplate this young woman and the possibility of a life not lived, a future left untouched. A quick internet search shows Sal that Martin died only recently, and the excerpt was published posthumously.

Alongside this revelation in her life, Sal is soon grappling with a recently published profile of a playwright she has penned (purr at that alliteration) that has proven to be a near-complete fabrication with Sal having taken the playwright at his word. Or, perhaps she is in part to blame for the way she wanted the narrative to shape itself around the playwright's story and the story she was interested in telling — the clues and hints she chose, on some level, to ignore.

Amidst the tangled web of Sal's life, there's her relationship with Hugh, which either is teetering on the edge of collapse or languishing in a state of inertia. With neither of them invested in salvaging it, Sal's focus shifts to contacting Moira, Martin's widow. She's determined to interview Moira, delve into Martin's life, and catch a glimpse of his unpublished manuscript, all in an attempt to uncover her own place within his story.

Sal becomes a vessel for others' memories, even down to memories she herself should own some part of. Occasionally, over the course of the novel, suffering from frequent lapses in memory during nights of heavy drinking, Sal — who is beginning to acknowledge her drinking problem — takes a secret delight in hearing about her own behavior as told through others' eyes.

Revolving around relationships, connections, and the dynamics between muse and artist, perception and reality, the true essence of The Mythmakers lies in exploring memory. The intriguing elements of this novel, skillfully conveyed by Weir through Sal, are inherently unanswerable. Reminding me of Flaubert's philosophy that "There is no truth. There is only perception," Weir delves into the notion that memory holds no absolute truth, but rather subjective interpretations and a collection of overlapping perceptions.

What I really liked about this one is that it raises the oft-asked questions about "Who owns a story? And who allowed to tell it?" without actually saying it and chewing it down into unresolvable cud. Instead, it's like the essence of those questions is woven into the very fabric of the story, expressed through its captivating visuals and the raw power of both its narrative and beautifully complex characters.

Weir has a wonderful grasp on her writing style and the way she chooses to craft her words, the scenes, and develop her characters. She lobs beautifully executed adjectives at you like a perfectly timed tennis ball. Weir takes you on a journey through different lenses of the storytellers — Sal, whose hand is all over every aspect of this story, Moira, Martin, Lillian (Martin's first wife), and eventually Caroline (Martin and Moira's daughter) and Wesley (an old friend of Martin's). At the heart of the novel, beginning with the piece about the playwright, lies the concept of truth, making it an intriguing choice to present the other perspectives through Sal's lens. Also, it's worth noting that many books that use this structure of an interviewer dealing with their own life while uncovering the lives of others often results in an imbalance in the narrative, but Weir masterfully handles both sides and there never feels like a true division between the sections. Magically it all feels like part of a larger whole — a bigger story.

The Mythmakers is a thought-provoking journey that invites you to ponder the complexities of storytelling and the endless possibilities of interpretation.

At a certain point I've grown tired of books that have interconnecting narratives just for the sake of it, that lean on the perceived cleverness or skill required to just tell us more and more and more. I've even read some that strained themselves by even adding a second narrative, because inevitably there's one that's far more compelling than the other. I didn't expect The Mythmakers to be this type of novel, though I guess I should have (I was sold on it by the title and cover, and only read the first line of the synopsis). This novel manages to do it much better than most, I am happy to report, even if it often resigns itself to being a scattered storm of a thing. I was interested in each life being depicted, and I never felt like I was trudging through a meaningless secondary narrative just to get back to the interesting stuff.

I'm not a huge fan of the melodrama it veers into at several points -- deaths, near-deaths, betrayals, revelations! -- but I am a huge fan of the many moments in-between, and I admire the greater questions it prods at, even if I think it could have done more to highlight them. I am yet unsure whether it lived up to the wildest expectations I may have had from the basic premise, but it was nevertheless a riveting read.

I don’t know why I saw this book so differently from most of those whose reviews I’ve read. I found it bordering on ridiculous that a woman who met a man for a few hours would believe that he had written a book about her and then would insinuate herself where she was not wanted into his grieving family’s life. I just could not like nor care for the main character. She messed up and was looking for something to make meaning of her life. She tried to steal it from a bunch of strangers. It seemed very much to be an actual MC with MC syndrome. Is that meta?

This book showed promise but went down hill fast. The story got confusing and the dialogue became unbelievable - it was a struggle to finish