An uneven but fascinating novel that offers Camelot devotees one more version of what might have been.
A woman discovers that she may be the secret daughter of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe in Pomerantz’s sprawling historical conspiracy saga.
McKenna Casey Gordon has spent her entire life believing she was simply one of five adopted children raised by a Chicago family (her grandfather, a powerful police captain with rumored mob connections, casts a long shadow over her childhood). When she’s an adult, a retired Secret Service agent arrives with an astonishing claim: McKenna is the biological daughter of President John F. Kennedy and actress Marilyn Monroe (who “left a mysterious printed note under the name of Joan Mallory, consenting to the adoption of her daughter”), hidden away through an elaborate network of political favors, family secrets, and carefully managed trusts. The revelation sends McKenna and her husband, James, down a labyrinthine path of decades-old conspiracies. The narrative expands well beyond questions of parentage, drawing connections between Monroe’s death, Kennedy family secrets, the influence of organized crime, and longstanding doubts surrounding the JFK assassination. The novel unfolds somewhat jarringly across multiple decades and locations, from Chicago political circles to New York to Arizona ranch country, where McKenna attempts to build a quiet life. The book’s greatest draw is its audacious premise—readers fascinated by Kennedy lore, Marilyn Monroe mythology, political conspiracies, and speculative history will find no shortage of compelling material here as the author demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of the people, events, and theories surrounding both icons. Unfortunately, the storytelling frequently struggles beneath the weight of the research. Scenes are routinely interrupted by lengthy discussions of presidential history, organized crime, adoption procedures, assassination theories, and current events. Characters often function less as fully realized individual people than as vehicles for exposition, delivering extended monologues that overexplain theories at the expense of advancing the drama. The central emotional thread remains compelling, but it’s frequently overshadowed by the author’s determination to weave every mystery surrounding Camelot into a single grand narrative. Still, readers captivated by the enduring mystique of the Kennedy dynasty may be willing to overlook the book’s structural excesses.
An uneven but fascinating novel that offers Camelot devotees one more version of what might have been.Pub Date: March 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781970844184
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Manhattan Book Group
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2026
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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