My Monticello

Product Information

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: THE most powerful read of summer 2022

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”. The professor fathers a son to serve as his experimental subject and observes him from afar. Sometimes he simply collects data, while at other times he tries to influence his son’s choices, by encouraging him, for instance, to participate in swimming rather than “the fraught cliché of basketball.” His goal is to “ prove [his son] was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” When the young man nears the end of college, the professor convinces himself that his son has “made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future.” Predictably, his hope doesn’t come to pass—instead, the young man becomes the victim of police brutality. What brave writing--for its willingness to seek the perfect form and the perfect word with which to tell these stories, even if it means telling the story in a non-standard way.The book was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. [11] My Monticello also won the 2021 Weatherford Prize, [12] the 2022 Library of Virginia Fiction Award, [13] the 2022 Lillian Smith Book Award, [14] and has been recognized as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, [15] the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize, [16] the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Prize, [17] the Balcones Fiction Prize, [18] the Library of Virginia's Annual Literary Awards, [19] and the Library of Virginia's People Choice Awards for Fiction. [20] The novel has also been long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner fiction award [21] and the Story Prize. [22] In 2022, My Monticello was also chosen as the Route 1 Reads book for Virginia. [23] Adaptation [ edit ] 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. 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 up This utterly absorbing novel – already set for a Netflix adaptation – is thus not just a meditation of how the brutal past of slavery still has a potent legacy in contemporary America; it also portrays the redemptive powers of love and care: “Why is it we love what we love?” Da’Naisha ponders near the end. “I felt such love at that moment, for every soul in that place, because they were like me and different. Because we’d become a part of one another.”

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

Library of Virginia Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards". www.lva.virginia.gov . Retrieved 2022-08-22. Lillian Smith Book Awards Recognize Short Story Collection, Nonfiction Book for Furthering Social Justice | UGA Libraries". www.libs.uga.edu . Retrieved 2022-06-06. The book is interested in how people react when the systems of society break down – by drawing together or pulling apart… 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.

Book Summary

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut novel, My Monticello, is a meditation on how the brutal past – and, in particular, the legacies of slavery – can be felt in the present. Guernica: Tell us about the origin of “My Monticello,” the titular story in your collection. What were the seeds, and how did it bloom in the way that it did? 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. Announcing the Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards". National Book Critics Circle. 2022-01-21 . Retrieved 2022-06-06. 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 Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Makes Virginia’s Past Present in ‘My

The First Street neighbourhood has a tight, communal spirit: “Older kids keeping an eye on the younger ones,” Da’Naisha observes, “like we were all cousins.” And this spirit endures once they’ve been uprooted from their homes. As they make their journey through Monticello and into the mountain, the group agrees to “collect and share all the food and drink we found on the mountain”. A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. It is ultimately this love, if anything, that can sustain the group in the isolation of the mountain, as they are hunted down by the white supremacist militia – and by the legacy of racism which accompanied the stirring idealism of Jefferson. This combination of qualities may well be the product of wisdom and experience accumulated over time: Johnson has lived and worked in Charlottesville, Virginia for over twenty years, teaching art to public school elementary students. She recently described herself as a “50-year-old literary debutant,” with the publication of her much-anticipated debut collection, and the announcement of a deal with Netflix. One might also argue that it took time for the literary world to catch up to Johnson and her extraordinarily timely stories, all uncannily prescient in evoking how a warming planet and unrestrained racism combine to bring existential dread to a fever pitch.

Need Help?

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. But mostly I knew my lineage the way most families know theirs: I knew because Momma told me, because MaViolet told her.” Having given you my opinion, I DO want you to know that the likes of Roxanne Gay, Colson Whitehead and Charles Yu have praised this book to the skies. So don't listen to me; see for yourself.