Though more saga than mystery, this ambitious novel takes big swings and mostly succeeds.
An unflinching drama about queer Black history in the guise of a glittering, slow-burn mystery about a closeted actor in Hollywood’s golden age.
In Newson’s second novel, Aaron Toussaint, a Black Hollywood insider, tells the story of two men who were his friends and lovers before one of them died under suspicious circumstances. Aaron is an intriguing and unusual character: a married Navy man turned studio fixer—investigator/muscle/private relations specialist—who’s gay and deeply closeted. In 1971, he decides to seek justice for his friends by chronicling their fabulous lives and tragic deaths in the 1950s and ’60s in a letter to a renowned gay journalist who’s created an archive of queer history. Within that frame, real history and debates over identity play a prominent role in this sexy and political novel. Aaron and his lovers represent divergent approaches to masculinity and queerness in the mid-20th century. Brutalized by his father and brother as a child, Aaron is guarded and conservative as a means of self-preservation. His ambivalence about his own sexuality and his passionate relationship with the fiercely closeted and self-consciously macho war hero Lt. Horace “the Hornet” Dixon, whom he served under and fell in love with in the Navy, set key events in motion. Rising star Xavier C. Barlow is Aaron’s other lover. When Xavier is cast as Horace in a Hollywood biopic, he’s determined to strike a blow against the celluloid closet by surfacing the hidden romantic connection between Aaron and Horace as subtext in the movie. As Aaron chronicles Xavier’s rise and fall, the three men mingle with real, boldfaced names like Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Diahann Carroll. They love, protest, and debate with passion. Blending the sensationalism of James Ellroy and the social awareness of Walter Mosley (though not his elegance), Aaron vividly demonstrates why Xavier’s grand life and likely murder needs to be part of the historical record. It’s fascinating, and yet while Xavier’s violent death looms over the proceedings, the vast majority of the novel focuses on how the men lived—so much so that it’s easy to forget the mystery and investigation, which only come into focus at the very end.
Though more saga than mystery, this ambitious novel takes big swings and mostly succeeds.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781250406149
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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