My Monticello

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Author Johnson’s imagination takes off from the day in 2017 when a young woman was killed by a white supremacist who intentionally drove his car into a group of protestors in Charlottesville. She layers on top of that electrical outages resulting from violent storms triggered by climate change. And in the midst of this chaos, the white supremacists take to the streets, terrorizing persons of color and others without economic means. A group of these persons escapes from the horrific conditions of the neighborhood, eventually settling at Monticello. Staff reports. "Dove, Eastman, Johnson top winners at Library of Virginia Literary Awards". Richmond Times-Dispatch . Retrieved 2022-10-18.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Waterstones My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Waterstones

Gray, Anissa (2021-10-15). "Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's 'My Monticello' explores America's racist past — and present — with grace". The Washington Post . Retrieved 2021-10-16.Guernica: In many ways, the subject matter your stories and characters explore are both the most intractable and the most urgent issues of our time. Given this, where would you say your work — and your characters — land on the spectrum of hope and despair? I remember looking out at all those people, most of whom I'd seen or known over months or years—several of whom I loved. Everybody was yelling or cowering or sneering, angry or afraid.” I hate plopping down a rating for a short story collection featuring a novella chaser. Generally speaking the stories within are of an unbalanced nature — you like some, you love one, and you find the others rather middling. It's hard to look at them as a smaller piece of a whole, because, really, they all stand on their own.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

The biggest challenge was thinking about the psychological and emotional costs of racism and extremism. It meant putting myself in the same mental space as my characters, being isolated and run out of home. That was hard to contemplate for characters that I grew to really like and care about. The night before the rally, groups of armed men started to turn upGuernica: One of the fascinating things about your work is how you tie in our history and legacy of slavery with the gradual destruction of the earth. Can you talk about this a little bit?

My book is me nudging forward from Jocelyn Nicole Johnson: ‘My book is me nudging forward from

The book is interested in how people react when the systems of society break down – by drawing together or pulling apart…I also liked “Virginia is Not Your Home”, narrated by January LaVoy. In rapid glimpses, this traces the life of the protagonist who is trying to escape her heritage. “You’ll look hard and wonder how the time passed so swiftly, how your mark on the world remains so shallow.” Narrated in epistolary style, the darkly satirical “Control Negro” is the strongest of the five short stories. The main character is a professor who seeks to understand just how much race (and racism) matter to life outcomes. To answer this question, he decides he needs “a Control Negro” free from the disadvantages of his own childhood. In 2017, a white supremacist drove his car headlong into a peaceful group opposing a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring dozens of others. There was widespread horror and outrage as footage of broken bodies bouncing off the car was broadcast around the world. But what if the tragedy did not shame local white nationalists, but embolden them? Such is the premise of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s riveting debut novel, which is set in the near future with the deadly assault in Charlottesville still in living memory. This story definitely has its merits and I learned a lot through reading it, but as a piece of entertainment (selfishly my principal goal in reading this one) it didn’t quite knit together for me. After a hectic beginning it's slow to develop and though I was eventually moved by what took place it took a long time for me to reach this level of engagement. Da’Naisha is the character who is designed to draw the reader in and this did work, but dialogue is strangely absent for much of the story and when it is present it consists mainly of one-liners and the odd casual comment. Therefore, I can only award this one three stars, though I predict I might be an outlier in rating this one so modestly.

Reviews of My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - BookBrowse

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. While I wasn’t blown away by My Monticello, I am curious to read this author’s other stories (which were sadly not included in my arc copy) and I would probably still recommend this to other readers.Johnson is a great observer. The novel is full of stunningly precise figurative language. This line, for example, early on in the narrative: “I saw that Devin had been injured: glass spiked along his forearm like bony plates on the spine of some extinct creature.” Describing a pair of non-identical twins, Ezra and Elijah, who are members of the group, she writes: “The twins looked like brothers, but not like the same person, as if one began where the other ended.” As the group walks through Piedmont, they find “the carcasses of a den of baby foxes in the pasture, their decaying bodies alive with flies”. My Monticello is a near-future apocalypse-esque tale which is all too easily imagined in the current era. White supremacists have hounded residents of Charlottesville out of their homes and the group seek refuge in Thomas Jefferson's plantation home as the supremacist hordes descend upon them. My Monticello is a 2021 book written by debut author Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, published October 5, 2021 by Henry Holt and Co. The books consists of five short stories and a novella. [1] Contents [ edit ]