My Monticello

Product Information

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. 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 | Kirkus Reviews MY MONTICELLO | Kirkus Reviews

What I liked best is the figurative use of Monticello, the house belonging Octavia Butler was revolutionary in taking the tropes of speculative fiction and other genre fiction and using them to think about gender, race and identity in really interesting ways. Reading Beloved by Toni Morrison when I was 16 or 17 and thinking about creating art from parts of American history that were so obscene – that was really influential. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ...A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life - immersive and comic, yet unsparing - that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities. I found the third story, Something Sweet on Our Tongues, to be a little too emotionally distant and reserved. While I still enjoyed it, the narrative is told in a first-person plural ("we") and this kept pushing me away from getting at the crux of the story or from understanding the main characters with the idea of we in mind. a gorgeous, devastating collection of stories spotlighting the ways a life, a country, and a planet can tend toward disaster but still be worth fighting for." necessary and brimming with both heart and imagination, Johnson’s My Monticello is a beautiful debut work of art.” Library of Virginia Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards". www.lva.virginia.gov . Retrieved 2022-08-22.

Reviews of My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - BookBrowse

And Monticello, where they stop on their way to the Piedmont Mountains, is the slave plantation of one of the founding fathers of America, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Da’Naisha is a descendant of Jefferson through his historically documented affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. That Johnson chooses to make her protagonist a descendent of Jefferson reveals the twin legacies of the man in contemporary America: Da’Naisha embodies the desire for freedom, but she is also cursed by the legacy of slavery. 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.Da'Naisha also happens to be a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and her ancestry makes her view Monticello through a very specific lens. Throughout the course of the novella, Da'Naisha also reflects on racism in America, slavery, white supremacy, and interracial relationship. Also, that this group has found refuge from white supremacists in a former plantation adds further complexity to their circumstances.

My Monticello - Harvard Review

I rarely read the blurb for a book, so at first was confused. I thought it was a historical fiction novel. WRONG. It is 5 short stories and a novella and the time period is NOW. NOW with all the racial problems we are beginning to recognize as endemic in the US. Lillian Smith Book Awards Recognize Short Story Collection, Nonfiction Book for Furthering Social Justice | UGA Libraries". www.libs.uga.edu . Retrieved 2022-06-06. Staff reports. "Dove, Eastman, Johnson top winners at Library of Virginia Literary Awards". Richmond Times-Dispatch . Retrieved 2022-10-18.I want to sell this one more than I want to sell my own book…This is a master storyteller’s arrival.”

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson review: hunted by a My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson review: hunted by a

I also based the neighborhood in the novella on First Street, which is right near my home. It’s very diverse and includes a cluster of public housing. In the story the characters are mostly fleeing from public housing. There are people from all over, who immigrated to the United States from all over the world. There are people of all colors, people of all ages, people of all ways of being in that space. I wanted the neighborhood in the book to have that quality as well, as I believe in the possibility of placing a lot of different people together and then finding some commonality.

Reader Reviews

The My Monticello audiobook is narrated by Aja Naomi King, January LaVoy, Landon Woodson, LeVar Burton, Ngozi Anyanwu, and Tomiwa Edun.