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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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