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A Blue Note
2022
Pauletta is a new PhD in History with a brilliant mind and academic scars she’s struggling to hide. In the summer after her tense graduation, she has a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship meant to prepare her to find a tenure track job she’s not even sure she wants. Instead of stacking her CV, Pauletta only wants to immerse in the history of her people.
1930s New York
Paule Campbell was born with Jazz in her veins. Her love of music took her from a rural town in Georgia all the way to New York in the throes of the Harlem Renaissance, a place where she could finally be herself — a fat, masculine, lesbian trumpet player with big dreams and a bigger heart. Soon after her arrival, she makes the intimate acquaintance of Amy Delphine, another Southern transplant pinning her dreams on art to escape the realities of Jim Crow.
--
During an all too short summer in the archives, Pauletta traces Paule and Amy’s tender love story through Paule’s letters home and Amy’s poetry and journals, unwittingly finding the courage to accept her own pain without being defined by it and open her heart to a life and love she was too afraid to hope could be hers.
Content Warnings
Mentions of lynching
Mentions of suicide
Mentions of disordered eating
Depression
Negative and ableist self-talk
Pauletta is a new PhD in History with a brilliant mind and academic scars she’s struggling to hide. In the summer after her tense graduation, she has a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship meant to prepare her to find a tenure track job she’s not even sure she wants. Instead of stacking her CV, Pauletta only wants to immerse in the history of her people.
1930s New York
Paule Campbell was born with Jazz in her veins. Her love of music took her from a rural town in Georgia all the way to New York in the throes of the Harlem Renaissance, a place where she could finally be herself — a fat, masculine, lesbian trumpet player with big dreams and a bigger heart. Soon after her arrival, she makes the intimate acquaintance of Amy Delphine, another Southern transplant pinning her dreams on art to escape the realities of Jim Crow.
--
During an all too short summer in the archives, Pauletta traces Paule and Amy’s tender love story through Paule’s letters home and Amy’s poetry and journals, unwittingly finding the courage to accept her own pain without being defined by it and open her heart to a life and love she was too afraid to hope could be hers.
Content Warnings
Mentions of lynching
Mentions of suicide
Mentions of disordered eating
Depression
Negative and ableist self-talk
358 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 26, 2026
About the author
Katrina Jackson
56 books739 followersKatrina is a seasoned spinster with an active imagination, a love of romcoms and a keenly critical nature. She's a college professor by day who writes romances by...weekend. Right now she also happens to be on summer vacation. She enjoys yogurt, sparkling water and her three cats, who don't appreciate her love.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 28, 2026
Gosh, this book was so good and hit me so deeply in the feelings. I love how much this is a story of family and different kinds of love. I loved the dual timeline and seeing Pauletta reading journals and seeing art while seeing that same time through the eyes of Paule and Amy. A Blue Note was one of my most anticipated releases and it didn’t disappoint. Katrina Jackson’s storytelling feels like it’s grown so much and the characters all felt so full and loving.
July 20, 2026
Starting with Paule and Amy. Their 1930s Harlem love story is given to you in pieces, letters, half scenes, 90 years of distance in between, and I finished it wanting a whole book of just them.
The 2022 timeline isn’t really a romance, and that’s ok. Lamine never quite becomes a full person, but we have Paulette as one, pulling herself up out of a depression that nearly ended her, held by family and by the dead women in her archive. And Aunt Adelaide ❤️
What this book does beautifully is write about Black people getting to be their whole selves across generations. Not trauma as the whole story, though the lynching history is there and Jackson doesn’t soften it for the reader. Two Black women in love in the 1930s who get tenderness and a life. A Black academic in 2022 whose struggle is treated as real. A family that keeps claiming her. Queer Black joy sitting right next to Black grief and neither one canceling the other out. I don’t feel like we see that balance often and this book was overflowing with it.
I’ll be honest about why this personally hurt in a good way. I’ve been where Pauletta is. My self-harm came from lawyer burnout instead of academia and seeing it written this carefully was hard to read and I’m glad I did. Jackson refuses the easy arc where romance fixes a broken person. She gets a little more ok bc the people around her simply won’t let go of her, and I needed to read that for her.
4.5 rounded up.
CONTENT WARNINGS: recent suicide attempt, depicted on page and discussed throughout. Severe depression. Racism. Discussion of lynching. Academic mistreatment and burnout. Handled with care, but heavy.
The 2022 timeline isn’t really a romance, and that’s ok. Lamine never quite becomes a full person, but we have Paulette as one, pulling herself up out of a depression that nearly ended her, held by family and by the dead women in her archive. And Aunt Adelaide ❤️
What this book does beautifully is write about Black people getting to be their whole selves across generations. Not trauma as the whole story, though the lynching history is there and Jackson doesn’t soften it for the reader. Two Black women in love in the 1930s who get tenderness and a life. A Black academic in 2022 whose struggle is treated as real. A family that keeps claiming her. Queer Black joy sitting right next to Black grief and neither one canceling the other out. I don’t feel like we see that balance often and this book was overflowing with it.
I’ll be honest about why this personally hurt in a good way. I’ve been where Pauletta is. My self-harm came from lawyer burnout instead of academia and seeing it written this carefully was hard to read and I’m glad I did. Jackson refuses the easy arc where romance fixes a broken person. She gets a little more ok bc the people around her simply won’t let go of her, and I needed to read that for her.
4.5 rounded up.
CONTENT WARNINGS: recent suicide attempt, depicted on page and discussed throughout. Severe depression. Racism. Discussion of lynching. Academic mistreatment and burnout. Handled with care, but heavy.
July 5, 2026
I really liked this one - and I have lots of thoughts!
- It’s dual timeline: contemporary MF set in 2022 and historical FF set in 1935. The historical bits are told in a mix of letters and scenes told from each of the FMC’s POVs.
- The contemporary does have an MF plot line, but it’s not genre romance for me. The romance is not the main focus, and the MMC has no POV and is not fleshed out at all.
- The historical is a FF romance. I could have read a whole novel of this relationship!
- Lots of heavy themes, so definitely check content warnings, particularly for the contemp FMC, who has recently attempted suicide. And there’s discussion of lynching in the historical portion.
- All of the sex scenes in the FF and MF storylines are softer focus than I am used to from this author. I’d say occasionally the reader is in the bed with the MCs, but mostly you’re in the room, and the focus is on emotions vs physical action/sensation. (I first noticed this in the FF storyline and I was all prepped for a side by side comparison with the MF storyline, but it was the same in both storylines. I think this is due to the contemp not being a true romance and the historical being told through the fuzzy lens of time as the contemp FMC looks back 60+ years to that story.)
- This makes the 3rd book in a row I’ve read by Katrina Jackson that has dealt with burnout, resentment, and depression caused by working in US academia. I sincerely hope that she has gotten out herself (assuming she came from there)!
- It’s dual timeline: contemporary MF set in 2022 and historical FF set in 1935. The historical bits are told in a mix of letters and scenes told from each of the FMC’s POVs.
- The contemporary does have an MF plot line, but it’s not genre romance for me. The romance is not the main focus, and the MMC has no POV and is not fleshed out at all.
- The historical is a FF romance. I could have read a whole novel of this relationship!
- Lots of heavy themes, so definitely check content warnings, particularly for the contemp FMC, who has recently attempted suicide. And there’s discussion of lynching in the historical portion.
- All of the sex scenes in the FF and MF storylines are softer focus than I am used to from this author. I’d say occasionally the reader is in the bed with the MCs, but mostly you’re in the room, and the focus is on emotions vs physical action/sensation. (I first noticed this in the FF storyline and I was all prepped for a side by side comparison with the MF storyline, but it was the same in both storylines. I think this is due to the contemp not being a true romance and the historical being told through the fuzzy lens of time as the contemp FMC looks back 60+ years to that story.)
- This makes the 3rd book in a row I’ve read by Katrina Jackson that has dealt with burnout, resentment, and depression caused by working in US academia. I sincerely hope that she has gotten out herself (assuming she came from there)!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews