Saturday Review: “An Argument for Authenticity” a review by Elaine Thomas in NCLR Online Winter 2025 of Daniel Wallace’s This Isn’t Going to End Well (2023)
Thomas reviews an intimate memoir detailing grief and explains points of interest and hidden meanings in the complicated lives and deaths in Wallace’s family. “Wallace’s search for a bearable answer to that question provides a psychologically compelling tale, written by a master storyteller. (Wallace, after all, is the guy who gave us Big Fish.)”
Trying to figure out Nealy–as a man, as a character, as a brother-in-law–starts as Wallace’s goal for the book. “Wallace viewed Nealy as a talented Renaissance man, one who could still fly, a model he himself wanted to become,” Thomas writes. But “In the struggle to understand his friend (and, by extension, himself), Wallace exhibits an authentic interior courage. It’s easy to feel empathy for both men. In the end, though, this is indeed Wallace’s story, and the reader awaits the author’s recognition and acknowledgement that, despite the impact of Nealy on his own life, their inner realities differ.”
Read the entire review here while you wait for the release of NCLR Online Winter 2025! To Order from the publisher, This Isn’t Going to End Well
