Review of "Danny and the Whale" by Wayne Mahon

​Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

Well, this is an interesting one!
And it's gonna be a bit challenging to judge and review.

On one hand, we actually REALLY liked aspects of this book. Some of the characters like Danny, Mia, and RJ are genuinely engaging and easy to get behind. The antics and shenanigans of the characters got a rise out of us. There's a ton of good jokes and humor. The writing is clever, which really elevates this. This book also really sinks you into the time-period of the early 80s with pop culture, music, posters, and more timely things. Oh, and another thing that really impressed us is how the titular whale—Belu—is used as a symbol, a beacon, and a fitting motif in this coming-of-age book.

On the other hand: what the hell? We kept asking ourselves that. This book is so scatterbrained and out of focus. There's so much randomness, dysfunction, chaos, and disjointedness. All of these characters are damaged, tainted, and troubled in some way. They're entangled in relationships with each other and plodding forward, sometimes at the pace of a tortoise or a snail. One of the things about this book that we both loved and hated about it is that it's so... mundane. Yes, there's drama. Yes, there's action and violence. Yes, there's romance. But most of this book feels like meandering. It often seems like all of these characters are lost, confused, and trying to find their own way in life. It seems like few of them actually know what they want or how to get it, and perhaps that's the point.

They spend so much of this book getting into trouble, wallowing in self-pity, doing drugs, and getting into squabbles.

And yet... we still enjoyed this book somehow.

So, let's talk about what we liked. Let's start with the core characters and some of the supporting characters.

First of all, the fact that they're flawed and damaged actually makes them more relatable and easy to get behind.

Danny is observant, intelligent, sensitive, and quietly funny, but he is also timid, traumatized, awkward, and painfully unsure of himself. That combination works. He is not some swaggering coming-of-age hero who kicks the door down and takes over the story. He is more like a kid trying to survive it. We liked that. His dissociation, his fear, his dreams of Hollywood, and his tendency to notice everything around him all make him feel very human. He is soft in a world that keeps punishing softness, and that gives the book a real emotional anchor. In the end, you really get the sense of how highly the other characters think of Danny and how he's earned their respect and affection, sometimes without fully realizing it.

Mia is another big reason this book works. In fact, some of us picked Mia as our favorite character. She is jagged, guarded, cynical, sexual, artistic, and often hard to read in the best way. She is not written like some idealized dream girl. She has real damage in her. She can be cruel, impulsive, self-protective, and frustrating. Good. That makes her interesting. The scenes involving her drawings, her cigarettes, her bathroom conversations, and her relationships with boys all help paint the picture of someone who is trying to stay in control of her own pain by turning herself into the kind of person nobody can really touch. That gives her a lot of bite.

One aspect of Mia's character really resonated with us: she's an artist, a creator, and a dreamer. She has made these remarkable, clever characters and stories like her Pumpkin Girls on Pumpkin Place, including Clumpkin, Prumpkin, Grumpkin, Jumpkin, Bumpkin, and Sumpkin. Then, as her imagination and pain seem to darken and mature, she creates her far edgier Barb Wire Betties, including figures like Scar Storm, Lash (or Lady Lash), and Vicious Vivacious.

And that is such a cool detail about her. These are not throwaway doodles. They feel like extensions of Mia’s inner life. The Pumpkin Girls suggest an earlier, softer, more playful imagination, while the Barb Wire Betties feel sharper, sadder, sexier, and more dangerous, like Mia taking all of her hurt, rage, and edge and turning it into art. That made us connect with her even more. She is not just a troubled girl in a leather jacket smoking cigarettes and pushing people away. She is someone with a real creative voice, someone building whole identities and emotional worlds on paper, and that gives her character an extra layer of depth and poignancy. She's creating stories within this story!

And it elevates Danny even more when he's one of the characters who recognizes her potential and encourages her.

Danny & Mia are great candidates for "Best Couple" in our contest, by the way. They have a real bond, great chemistry—an organic connection that slowly brews and builds throughout the novel.

And then there is RJ, who might honestly be the coolest character in the whole book. He has that effortless local-legend energy from the moment he appears. He plays guitar, he has a reputation, he is dangerous enough to be interesting, but he also has vulnerability underneath all of that. That matters. Without that vulnerability, he would just be another too-cool rebel archetype. Instead, he becomes one of the emotional engines of the story. He feels like the kind of character a lot of readers are going to latch onto immediately.

The supporting cast also deserves some credit. Gram is one of the warmest presences in the book and gives it some much-needed heart and wisdom. Danny’s mother, Sophia, is a train wreck of a character, but intentionally so. She is manipulative, inappropriate, selfish, chaotic, and often downright disturbing. She is not “fun” to read in a cozy sense, but she is memorable, and her presence helps explain so much of Danny’s emotional wiring. Frank, likewise, is awful in a way that feels heavy and oppressive. This book is full of people who leave bruises on each other, emotionally and otherwise. Gram is probably a candidate for "Best Supporting Character" in our contest. She makes a profoundly positive impact on Danny. She also contributes the quote that resonates throughout this book: "Don’t let the world that hurt you, be the world that makes you."

That line is not just a touching piece of dialogue. It is basically the thematic heartbeat of the whole novel. It speaks to Danny’s trauma, RJ’s pain, Mia’s emotional armor, and even the broader struggle of these kids trying not to become permanent products of the damage around them. It is one of the wisest and most memorable lines in the book, and it gives Gram an even bigger presence than her page count alone might suggest.

Ivan also gets a ton of love and attention near the end of this book, but we probably weren't as sold on him as the narrative seemed to want us to be.

Then there's Mushroom. Ok, can we just say that some of these character nicknames come across as really silly? You could argue they help to facilitate the absurdist tone of a lot of this book.

And that leads us to one of the strangest strengths of the book: the absurdist, snarky, sarcastic, sassy humor. We actually really dug this.

This isn't dry prose or flat dialogue. Every page is packing some spice.
And, yes, most of our favorite parts were crude and vulgar, but darn would we by lying if we said it didn't get a kick out of us!

Here are some of our favorite funny lines and passages from the book:

"I sat in my beanbag chair, playing solitaire at 2:28am, waiting for the school’s fourth-best
running back to wake up and get the fuck out of my house."

"If I ever told Mushroom he was sweet, he’d stab me in the eye with a lawn dart."

"The left side of my butt fell asleep."

"He was just a sucker for small tits and glasses."

"Tara told me, loud sex was only hot if it was the girl being loud. A guy being loud was just funny. "

"We went to his bedroom to hang out. His side of the room was comic books and ‘book books.'"

"You always think you’re so wise after half a dozen fortune cookies.”

And this one is just really great at providing visceral details you can feel:

"I had never really liked Rainbow before, but that song helped the pain feel good, like digging a toothpick into a rotted molar."

There are other aspects of this book that are genuinely funny in a very specific, chaotic way, like when Danny ends up getting a job at the Golden Dragon barely a day after helping rob the place and stealing Joy Fang’s cherry brandy. That whole scenario is absurdly good. Danny walks in nervous that Joy will recognize him, while Mushroom casually introduces him to his mother and acts like this is all perfectly normal, then just hands him a job anyway. The humor comes from the sheer nerve of it, but also from Danny’s panic. He is sitting there trying to be polite and employable in front of the very family he was just stealing from, and the scene somehow manages to be tense, ridiculous, and weirdly charming all at once.

Not all of this absurdist, vulgar humor landed for us. For example, there’s a scene in which Danny wakes up at 3:17 in the morning to find Sal completely obliterated and urinating all over his crates of records because, in his drunken brain, he thinks he’s at a gas station. Danny is horrified, Sal is mumbling nonsense and nearly peeing on Danny too, and then Gram walks in, sees the disaster, and just sighs, “Again?” before calmly taking over cleanup duty. We get what the scene is doing. It is trying to be gross, chaotic, sad, and darkly funny all at once. And to be fair, the “Again?” line from Gram is pretty good. But this was one of those moments where the book’s taste for random, vulgar absurdity pushed a little too far for us. Instead of feeling sharply funny, it felt more like the novel elbowing us and saying, “Look how dysfunctional this family is.” We already knew that. Things like that just come across as stupid, ridiculous, and unnecessary. But you can't win 'em all.

By the way, Sal is in this book in case we forgot to mention that before. That's kinda how some of these characters are. They're just... here for some reason. There's so much friggin' going on in this book and so many characters. There are factions beating each other up constantly, feuding for some reason, and we're often lost as to why. We're introduced to all these big bully-type characters, and they all sorta blend and blur together.

There's a sexual assault in here by the way, so be warned. There's also an accident. Shooting(s). A lot of people getting beat up for some reason, as we mentioned.

It's strange how all these super serious things get blended into this book with so much absurdist, vulgar humor.

It's equally strange how such heartwarming things like Danny & Mia's relationship and Gram's powerful words get blended into something so tragic and violent.

We think our biggest gripe with this book is how meandering and drawn out it feels. The ending of this book is like the ending of Lord of the Rings. There are like four or five times when this book needed to wrap up and just refused to.

Anyway... this is a mixed bag if we ever saw one!

Oh, and really quickly... it's really admirable what the author was trying to do with the whale, which clearly is meant to parallel the characters, who are trapped in this place just like the whale is trapped in the harbor. They talk to the whale like he's some kind of wish-granting genie or local deity, yet he's just a baby animal who is trying to find a way just like they are.

Check out the Instagram page.