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Nola and Baldwin
Their Eyes Were Watching God for a new generation craving a romantic finale—a sweeping historical tale that is a journey of the heart and of the times.
If it wasn’t for Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nola Denny didn’t know how she would have survived her father’s tragic death or her mother’s descent into mental illness. Inspired by Hurston’s main character, Janie Crawford, Nola sets out to find her own voice, silenced by the weight of being a caretaker and the pains of her past. On her journey to New York, Nola stops in Meridian—a detour that unexpectedly leads to a fresh start, a home, and her own Tea Cake, a Pullman Porter named Baldwin Carter.
Baldwin escaped a loveless childhood and found a caring stranger who invited him into her home and gave him a chance at a new life. A proud, hardworking Pullman Porter, Baldwin must endure bowing and scraping to passengers who barely see him as a man. When he encounters Nola, he instinctively knows he has met his anchor, a woman who makes every inch of him stand tall.
Experiencing loss, hardship, and months of separation, Nola and Baldwin must come to terms with their pasts to share a future together. The young couple know that time and distance cannot separate them, and that the sacrifices they must make are not only for themselves, but for all those who come after them, searching for a better life.
Set during the end of the Great Depression, and shaped by real-world events, crisscrossing the country from South to Midwest to North, Nola and Baldwin is an epic tale of a love powerful enough to overcome the dark forces of racism that threatens to tear it apart.
If it wasn’t for Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nola Denny didn’t know how she would have survived her father’s tragic death or her mother’s descent into mental illness. Inspired by Hurston’s main character, Janie Crawford, Nola sets out to find her own voice, silenced by the weight of being a caretaker and the pains of her past. On her journey to New York, Nola stops in Meridian—a detour that unexpectedly leads to a fresh start, a home, and her own Tea Cake, a Pullman Porter named Baldwin Carter.
Baldwin escaped a loveless childhood and found a caring stranger who invited him into her home and gave him a chance at a new life. A proud, hardworking Pullman Porter, Baldwin must endure bowing and scraping to passengers who barely see him as a man. When he encounters Nola, he instinctively knows he has met his anchor, a woman who makes every inch of him stand tall.
Experiencing loss, hardship, and months of separation, Nola and Baldwin must come to terms with their pasts to share a future together. The young couple know that time and distance cannot separate them, and that the sacrifices they must make are not only for themselves, but for all those who come after them, searching for a better life.
Set during the end of the Great Depression, and shaped by real-world events, crisscrossing the country from South to Midwest to North, Nola and Baldwin is an epic tale of a love powerful enough to overcome the dark forces of racism that threatens to tear it apart.
384 pages, Paperback
Expected publication November 10, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I absolutely loved this book! Everything about it was amazing, from beginning to end. The first page gripped me, and I didn’t want to stop reading. If I’d had the time, I would’ve finished the book in one day.
Nola and Baldwin were exceptionally written characters that I immediately grew to love. I honestly felt like I knew them, because although set in a different period, their stories were so relatable. Every joy and heartbreak they experienced felt like my own.
Their love for one another was palpable, and I enjoyed seeing their story unfold. I’m a sucker for romance, and this book hit all the right notes. It wasn’t too heavy-handed, and the pacing was great. I also liked how the friendships were displayed and how they were just as important as the lead romance.
The historical aspect did a good job of displaying what it was like to live during the early 1900s. I also appreciated learning about the Pullman Porters and their history, especially how white passengers disregarded their humanity. There were times when I wanted to know what year it was, but it didn’t distract from anything happening in the book.
All in all, this was a fantastic read, and I would recommend it to anyone. I can’t wait to see what else Donna Hill has in store.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Nola and Baldwin were exceptionally written characters that I immediately grew to love. I honestly felt like I knew them, because although set in a different period, their stories were so relatable. Every joy and heartbreak they experienced felt like my own.
Their love for one another was palpable, and I enjoyed seeing their story unfold. I’m a sucker for romance, and this book hit all the right notes. It wasn’t too heavy-handed, and the pacing was great. I also liked how the friendships were displayed and how they were just as important as the lead romance.
The historical aspect did a good job of displaying what it was like to live during the early 1900s. I also appreciated learning about the Pullman Porters and their history, especially how white passengers disregarded their humanity. There were times when I wanted to know what year it was, but it didn’t distract from anything happening in the book.
All in all, this was a fantastic read, and I would recommend it to anyone. I can’t wait to see what else Donna Hill has in store.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review.
July 18, 2026
This is a beautiful story. The historical detail is also a character of the story. Nola and Baldwin both have early years of trauma they move on and find family and begin new lives. They have a meet cute on a train and they cross paths again with hope and intention. Nola has dreams and plans fueled by her favorite book written by Zora Neale Hurston. A love story that moves through the Great Depression, organizing, Jim Crow, and what it looks like to create the life you want .This is a beautifully written story. this is a story of love, a story of friendship, a story of family, a story of grief, a story of black life.
I recommend this book.
I recommend this book.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Nola and Baldwin is a historical love story that is set during the final years of the Great Depression. Donna Hill writes both the sweetness of first love and the harsh realities Black families endured as they worked to build lives with dignity in a world determined to deny them both opportunity and safety.
After losing her father to murder and watching her mother succumb to mental illness, Nola dreams of seeing the world and eventually making her way to New York City. Those plans shift when she falls in love with Baldwin, a hardworking railroad porter whose job keeps him constantly on the move. As life brings unexpected turns, Nola has to decide whether love and purpose can coexist and how to reclaim the future she imagined for herself.
One of my favorite details was the way Their Eyes Were Watching God is woven throughout the novel. As Nola’s favorite book, Janie’s journey becomes both a mirror and a guide, reminding her that finding your voice sometimes means choosing yourself, even after life has rewritten your plans.
Beautifully written and rich with historical detail, this is a moving novel about love, grief, and the courage to imagine a life beyond what the world expects of you.
After losing her father to murder and watching her mother succumb to mental illness, Nola dreams of seeing the world and eventually making her way to New York City. Those plans shift when she falls in love with Baldwin, a hardworking railroad porter whose job keeps him constantly on the move. As life brings unexpected turns, Nola has to decide whether love and purpose can coexist and how to reclaim the future she imagined for herself.
One of my favorite details was the way Their Eyes Were Watching God is woven throughout the novel. As Nola’s favorite book, Janie’s journey becomes both a mirror and a guide, reminding her that finding your voice sometimes means choosing yourself, even after life has rewritten your plans.
Beautifully written and rich with historical detail, this is a moving novel about love, grief, and the courage to imagine a life beyond what the world expects of you.
Read
November 8, 2026Adding this novel to my top reads list of 2026. 🥹💫
Nola and Baldwin is a story about Black young love and how two strong-minded individuals did their part to help build up the Black middle class community in the 1930s and 1940s.
Nola and Baldwin both experienced some trying times in their childhood that led them on a journey to find a better life as adults. Donna Hill does an amazing job with showing us how two Black young individuals that met at a train stop romantically fall in love and do what they think is right for the Black community during those times. This was such a beautiful story and I just didn’t want it to end. Nola referring to her favorite book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and asking “what would Janie do?” throughout her journey just made the story seem so surreal.
Nola and Baldwin is a story about Black young love and how two strong-minded individuals did their part to help build up the Black middle class community in the 1930s and 1940s.
Nola and Baldwin both experienced some trying times in their childhood that led them on a journey to find a better life as adults. Donna Hill does an amazing job with showing us how two Black young individuals that met at a train stop romantically fall in love and do what they think is right for the Black community during those times. This was such a beautiful story and I just didn’t want it to end. Nola referring to her favorite book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and asking “what would Janie do?” throughout her journey just made the story seem so surreal.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Donna Hill’s moving portrayal of Black life and Black love in the 1930s and ‘40s
Thanks to Harper Collins Amistad for providing an advance reader copy through NetGalley!
Nola Faye Denney’s life changes irrevocably when she is just eight years old: she wakes one morning to find both of her parents missing, and finds them outside instead, her mother collapsed on the ground in deep grief and her father swinging in the tree overhead. Nola spends the next decade raising herself and caring for her mother, who retreated deep into her own mind after the loss of Nola’s father. After her mother dies, Nola decides to finally live her dream of leaving Rudell, Mississippi, and heading for New York. She has read and reread Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and always longed to follow in the footsteps of its heroine; with nothing left tying her to the place where her family suffered such devastation, she sets off on the train.
Baldwin Carter spends his childhood under the tyrannical thumb of a father who blames him for surviving when his mother died birthing him. The best choice he can make for himself as a teen is running away, so he does. When he stops to ask an older woman for water, he doesn’t expect to find a new home. But Miss Lottie has been living alone since the death of her son, and she offers him a place by her hearth and a warm meal. He thanks her by fixing up her house and taking care of her. Eventually, he gets a job as a porter on the trains; riding the rails gives him a chance to really make some money and take care of Miss Lottie in the last few years of her life. He feels lost and lonely after losing the only mother he’s ever known, until the day he meets a beautiful passenger named Nola.
This is a meticulously researched and incredibly stirring portrait of Black American life in the 1930s and ’40s. The titular characters are brought to life for the reader in alternating point-of-view chapters that allow each to draw the reader into their lives and show the shape of their world through their differing experiences. Baldwin has his friends, Rufus and Joshua, working with him on the trains, and his chapters usher the reader behind the scenes, revealing the experience of working in a system that degrades you, the clever behaviors porters developed to mitigate the harms they faced, and the camaraderie they built amongst themselves. Nola, meanwhile, builds up and creates community wherever she goes, whether it’s bantering with the regulars at Miss Maggie’s, teaching Sissy to read and building her confidence, or joining the local NAACP meetings held by a neighbor of Baldwin’s. The interconnectedness of Black life is almost a background character in its own right, as we consistently see both the willingness to rely on other members of one’s community and the willingness to step up in support demonstrated.
I have an academic background in Black American history and labor history, and was therefore familiar with much about the world shown here: Pullman train porters and their struggles; the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and the union he formed for them, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; sundown towns and the Green Book, a guide for Black travelers that advised them on which towns had accommodations for them, which were best to avoid after dark, and where Black people could stop for food or even just to use the restroom while on the road; and the many Black newspapers, large and small, that connected Black communities across the nation and served as a vital source of information for many communities. However, this book is very accessibly written, and I think readers without much familiarity on these topics will nevertheless be able to enjoy it. And I hope that it might even spur readers to read up more on these incredibly important historical events and people!
I did struggle with the scenes of disrespect and discrimination that the characters had to suffer through. Reading these books as a Black American can be incredibly heavy, knowing that members of your own family likely faced similar incidents and survived at the whim of the white people they encountered. There are tense scenes where Baldwin encounters police who harass him, or his supervisors make derogatory remarks and write him up for spurious reasons, and Nola’s encounters with police are nearly as harrowing. Meanwhile, there are constant reminders in the background of the post-Reconstruction South’s view of Black people: segregated train cars and waiting rooms, the casual disregard of white clerks, the unwillingness of white passengers to even learn the individual names of the porters serving them… Still, the characters also demonstrate quick thinking and cleverness to make their own lives easier, and they are just as resilient as we know ourselves and our ancestors to be.
Nola and Baldwin is a great work of historical fiction, and I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy books exploring Black American history, readers who want moving stories of Black love, and anyone who would like an accessible look at the lives of the Pullman porters and their union. This is a story of resilience, hard choices, societal pressures, and having the commitment to do the right thing. It is a story about building community and making a way out of no way, having faith in yourself and your abilities, and being strong enough to compromise when necessary. Emotionally engaging and deeply impactful, this one is well worth picking up.
Thanks to Harper Collins Amistad for providing an advance reader copy through NetGalley!
Nola Faye Denney’s life changes irrevocably when she is just eight years old: she wakes one morning to find both of her parents missing, and finds them outside instead, her mother collapsed on the ground in deep grief and her father swinging in the tree overhead. Nola spends the next decade raising herself and caring for her mother, who retreated deep into her own mind after the loss of Nola’s father. After her mother dies, Nola decides to finally live her dream of leaving Rudell, Mississippi, and heading for New York. She has read and reread Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and always longed to follow in the footsteps of its heroine; with nothing left tying her to the place where her family suffered such devastation, she sets off on the train.
Baldwin Carter spends his childhood under the tyrannical thumb of a father who blames him for surviving when his mother died birthing him. The best choice he can make for himself as a teen is running away, so he does. When he stops to ask an older woman for water, he doesn’t expect to find a new home. But Miss Lottie has been living alone since the death of her son, and she offers him a place by her hearth and a warm meal. He thanks her by fixing up her house and taking care of her. Eventually, he gets a job as a porter on the trains; riding the rails gives him a chance to really make some money and take care of Miss Lottie in the last few years of her life. He feels lost and lonely after losing the only mother he’s ever known, until the day he meets a beautiful passenger named Nola.
This is a meticulously researched and incredibly stirring portrait of Black American life in the 1930s and ’40s. The titular characters are brought to life for the reader in alternating point-of-view chapters that allow each to draw the reader into their lives and show the shape of their world through their differing experiences. Baldwin has his friends, Rufus and Joshua, working with him on the trains, and his chapters usher the reader behind the scenes, revealing the experience of working in a system that degrades you, the clever behaviors porters developed to mitigate the harms they faced, and the camaraderie they built amongst themselves. Nola, meanwhile, builds up and creates community wherever she goes, whether it’s bantering with the regulars at Miss Maggie’s, teaching Sissy to read and building her confidence, or joining the local NAACP meetings held by a neighbor of Baldwin’s. The interconnectedness of Black life is almost a background character in its own right, as we consistently see both the willingness to rely on other members of one’s community and the willingness to step up in support demonstrated.
I have an academic background in Black American history and labor history, and was therefore familiar with much about the world shown here: Pullman train porters and their struggles; the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and the union he formed for them, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; sundown towns and the Green Book, a guide for Black travelers that advised them on which towns had accommodations for them, which were best to avoid after dark, and where Black people could stop for food or even just to use the restroom while on the road; and the many Black newspapers, large and small, that connected Black communities across the nation and served as a vital source of information for many communities. However, this book is very accessibly written, and I think readers without much familiarity on these topics will nevertheless be able to enjoy it. And I hope that it might even spur readers to read up more on these incredibly important historical events and people!
I did struggle with the scenes of disrespect and discrimination that the characters had to suffer through. Reading these books as a Black American can be incredibly heavy, knowing that members of your own family likely faced similar incidents and survived at the whim of the white people they encountered. There are tense scenes where Baldwin encounters police who harass him, or his supervisors make derogatory remarks and write him up for spurious reasons, and Nola’s encounters with police are nearly as harrowing. Meanwhile, there are constant reminders in the background of the post-Reconstruction South’s view of Black people: segregated train cars and waiting rooms, the casual disregard of white clerks, the unwillingness of white passengers to even learn the individual names of the porters serving them… Still, the characters also demonstrate quick thinking and cleverness to make their own lives easier, and they are just as resilient as we know ourselves and our ancestors to be.
Nola and Baldwin is a great work of historical fiction, and I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy books exploring Black American history, readers who want moving stories of Black love, and anyone who would like an accessible look at the lives of the Pullman porters and their union. This is a story of resilience, hard choices, societal pressures, and having the commitment to do the right thing. It is a story about building community and making a way out of no way, having faith in yourself and your abilities, and being strong enough to compromise when necessary. Emotionally engaging and deeply impactful, this one is well worth picking up.
Read
November 9, 2026Baldwin) Black People have always been unprotected, but one thing this book showed me was how deeply we love even through tragedy. This love saga through Nola and Baldwin”s meager beginnings where each has suffered a great loss, both yearn for something greater outside of what life has dealt them. They journey outside of Mississippi and find each other, Baldwin traveling back and forth and working as a Pullman Porter, and Nola with her best friend starts a business. I really appreciated hearing about the Pullman Porter’s history and struggles for fair treatment and forming the Brotherhood, and all the things suffered through before the Civil Rights Movement (esp. Phillip A. Randolph). Another added touch to the story was Nola’s love of writing and comparing love to the love in Their Eyes Were Watching God between Teacake and Janie. This book is also a reminder to read books about the Crisis Magazine, and The Chicago Defender, and The Green Book historical black publications we should never forget. This was a mostly audible listen because I loved the duet narration and I was curious how well it would be read by Robin Miles who I love when she reads science fiction. Thank you @netgalley @amistadbooks for the e-ARC and audible via @librofm I highly recommend this one for historical fiction and romance readers.
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November 4, 2026
Easily one of my favorite reads of 2026. Nola and Baldwin’s story will stay with me, and the yearning is chef’s kiss. I also loved Nola and Sissy’s friendship and sisterhood. As Nola and Baldwin navigate loss, find their voices and build a found family, Their Eyes Were Watching God shapes Nola’s choices and desires. It’s as much a love letter to Zora Neale Hurston and her legacy as it is a love story. TEWWG is to Nola what All About Love is to the millennial girlies.
Thanks to Amistad for the ARC!
Thanks to Amistad for the ARC!
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
Very interesting and readable
October 8, 2026
Knew I was hooked by page 8!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews