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My Monticello

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The action here takes place in the near future, a time in which storms have created enough chaos for social breakdown to occur (global warming is hinted at as the cause). And it’s all energy at the outset as we are introduced a significant number of characters. We see the story unfold through the eyes of Da’Naisha a young university student who is a descendent of Jefferson’s (through his relationship with a biracial woman slave called Sally Hemings). But after the drama of opening scene the pace slows significantly until, belatedly, there’s a rapid build-up to a crescendo finish. 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”.

review: My Monticello, by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Book review: My Monticello, by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

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. 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. Chilling, thought-provoking and expertly crafted… Johnson’s [stories] broke my heart as well as my brain." What I liked best is the figurative use of Monticello, the house belonging to Jefferson and where he both kept slaves and impregnated one (or more? my knowledge of US history is shaky) whose descendants are at the heart of the book. The disputed nature of American history, who 'owns' Monticello and who are its descendants are where the interests and weight of this lay for me. And wow - that incendiary ending! 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.”

Reader Reviews

a magnificent debut that holds so much in its gaze―great love and great oppression, tremendous individual courage and systemic racism, futures of joyful justice and futures of extremism. This breathtaking, artful book is a gift." 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.”

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Announcing the Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards". National Book Critics Circle. 2022-01-21 . Retrieved 2022-06-06. Guernica: Can you talk more about Da’Naisha Love? How and why is it that she’s the one to lead this group in this moment, and to this place, Monticello? 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. This interview is a sort of homecoming for Johnson, whose first published short story “Control Negro” appeared in Guernica after our editors read it in the slush. “Control Negro” went on to be chosen by Roxane Gay for the Best American Short Stories 2018 and read on radio by LeVar Burton as part of PRI’s Selected Shorts series, and is included in the new collection. I spoke with Johnson from her home in Charlottesville.

BookBrowse Review

I was enthralled from the opening lines of this book. These chilling, thought-provoking and expertly crafted stories showcase Johnson's range and ability―they broke my heart as well as my brain. A stunning collection. This fiction collection is an astonishing display of craftsmanship and heart-tugging narratives. Johnson is a brilliant storyteller who gracefully reflects a clear mirror on a troubled America. 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 vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life - immersive and comic, yet unsparing - that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities.

My Monticello: 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 | TIME My Monticello: 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 | TIME

I admire Ms. Johnson’s creative plots that express herself in these short stories. The Control Negro and My Monticello are particularly clever and impactful. The apocalypse in My Monticello smartly equates to our current race culture in the U.S., and the protagonist’s secret pregnancy somewhat parallels Thomas Jefferson’s quandary of biracial children. Guernica: 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? 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. Guernica: You skirt an edge, particularly in “Control Negro” and “My Monticello,” between the present and a very near future, where what’s come to pass feels both unthinkable and also completely, frighteningly possible. We also see, in “My Monticello,” glimpses of what has occurred, including the Unite the Right rally and the murder of Heather Heyer. Can you talk about these gestures and the connections you make between our current reality and an imagined near future?Johnson: I absolutely love all my characters, even the hard-to-love people. I think that’s why I’m a public school teacher: I kind of love the person who’s a mess, and I love the person who is difficult. They’re all doing the best they can, even when they’re doing things I really wish they wouldn’t do; I hope that comes through. Some of the predicaments are bleak, but I don’t think the characters are. They all want something; they all want to be cared on; they all love or care about someone, or long for something. And I hope readers identify with that. I was a public school teacher for 20 years and I’m a huge proponent of community. I’ve had classes where all kinds of people who might not otherwise have a lot in common create some sort of relationship and unity. I definitely tried to highlight that in the book. I really used the ideas of teaching to shape how my protagonist, Da’Naisha Love, tries to get her group of neighbours to work together in this very tense situation. She has them do what a teacher would do on the first day of school – they commit to a list of things they all do together, to get by. Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ... An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

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