My Monticello

Product Information

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.

Goodreads Loading interface - Goodreads

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. 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. 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. If you buy one book in October, it should be this one. MY MONTICELLO is a collection of short stories and a novella that explore race, identity, and more. Beautifully written, nuanced, and insightful, they each make you think. My introverted self found myself wishing for a book club so I could discuss these stories with others.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.

MY MONTICELLO | READ BY A FULL CAST | Macmillan Audio MY MONTICELLO | READ BY A FULL CAST | Macmillan Audio

The title novella in My Monticello, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut collection of short fiction, is set in a dystopian future that mirrors the crises of our own day. Following a summer of wildfires, extreme heatwaves, and “a national election girded by massive demonstrations,” narrator Da’Naisha Hemings Love explains, the East Coast is hit with “great and terrible storms” that disrupt transportation, take down the power grid, and cause mobile phones to go “glitchy and dark in our palms.” As she says, “It was unclear if we were under siege, or whether the world was toppling under its own needless weight.” Lillian Smith Book Awards Recognize Short Story Collection, Nonfiction Book for Furthering Social Justice | UGA Libraries". www.libs.uga.edu . Retrieved 2022-06-06. 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. 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. Egelman, Sarah Rachel (October 5, 2021). "My Monticello: Fiction". Book Reporter . Retrieved 2021-10-16.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. 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.

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

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! Virginia is Not Your Home, the second story, was also a showcase. Not quite as compelling as the first, but that was more in line with the nature of the story itself. The style here is sort of an unfurling of a tale . . . the second-person narration is clipped and feels well up above the story, but once I was able to settle into the rhythm, the delivery was smooth with a wonderful, understated ache. 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.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." 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. 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. 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. 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