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Title details for My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - Available

My Monticello

Fiction

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Aja Naomi King
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner

Read by a full cast of narrators, featuring LeVar Burton and Aja Naomi King
"A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying." —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle
"...'My Monticello' is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it." — The Washington Post

Winner of the Weatherford Award in Fiction
A winner of 2022 Lillian Smith Book Awards
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.
Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, "My Monticello," tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da'Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson's historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.
In "Control Negro," hailed by Roxane Gay as "one hell of story," a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to "painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there." Johnson's characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through "Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse."
United by these characters' relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable collection that bears witness to this country's legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 5, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781250820723
      • File size: 218918 KB
      • Duration: 07:36:04

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      A group of talented narrators deliver these short stories set in Virginia, which focus on the lives of African Americans. The standouts are "My Monticello" and "Control Negro." In the latter, narrator LeVar Burton rants furiously as a father who experiments on his own son to prove that a Black man will always be found inferior to whites--despite his talents. Narrator Aja Naomi King dazzles in "My Monticello," which takes place in the near future and introduces Da'Naisha, who is descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Da'Naisha commandeers a bus that is transporting neighbors to the safety of Jefferson's Plantation, a tourist attraction, after white militias destroy their neighborhood. King is captivating as the neighbors are sustained by the luxuries found at the mansion. S.G.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 9, 2021
      Johnson wrestles with questions of racial identity, post-racial society, and the legacies of slavery in her masterly debut collection. The pitch-perfect opener, “Control Negro,” follows Cornelius, a Black history professor whose peers mistake him for a janitor and whom white students mock with racist jokes, prompting him to plot with a married Black graduate student to have a son together and give him opportunities equal to those of “Average Caucasian Males.” In the experiment, the “Control Negro” doesn’t learn the identity of his father, and Cornelius observes from a distance, hopeful his son will turn out better. Other stories reckon with institutionalized racism in schools (“Something Sweet on the Tongue”) and the collateral damage wrought by the trauma endured by immigrants prior to leaving their homelands (“King of Xandria”). The superb title novella is set in the near future in Charlottesville, Va., where the Unite the Right rally has cast a long shadow and white supremacists pillage the downtown area. A collective of BIPOC residents decamp to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, seeking refuge. There’s Da’Naisha Hemings Love; her white boyfriend, Knox; and her other largely Black and brown neighbors. Love and her grandmother, MaViolet, descend from the Jefferson-Sally Hemings lineage, and thus occupy a unique position in the group. The author’s riveting storytelling and skill at rendering complex characters yield rich social commentary on Monticello and Jefferson’s complex ideologies of freedom, justice, and liberty. This incandescent work speaks not just to the moment, but to history.

    • BookPage
      Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s intricate story collection, My Monticello, explores how it feels to be Black or biracial in America. Johnson doesn’t shy away from any topic as she calmly delivers, with too-real certainty, a ruthless kind of truth.  These six innovative, avant-garde stories showcase Johnson’s ingenuity. In “Control Negro,” a Black professor studies his son from a distance, scientifically examining the young man’s evolving life and comparing it to those of American Caucasian Males (ACMs). In “Virginia Is Not Your Home,” a young biracial woman yearns to break free of her roots by changing her name and leaving home. And in the eponymous novella, a group of neighbors from Charlottesville, Virginia, flee to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello after their neighborhood is destroyed by white terrorists.  Johnson plots each piece delicately, arranging them so that the subtleties shine through. The stories range in content and in tone—some ironic, some hopeful, some slightly sadistic—but each pulls its own weight, and each feels completely natural alongside the rest of the collection.  Some are written in first person, while others unfold solely through second-person imperatives. Some are in past tense, others in present; some are epistolary, some more traditional. Throughout, Johnson’s one-of-a-kind voice offers a gateway to new perspectives, and necessary ones at that. Part of the enjoyment in reading My Monticello is gaping at Johnson’s seemingly endless skill in plotting and sentence structure. While the novella is a bit slow-paced at first, and a couple of the stories could have benefited from a more apparent focal point, the collection is full of depth, and there are too many takeaways to count.  Fans of story collections like The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans will appreciate this fictionalized outlook on America’s present and future. My Monticello is both unprecedented and inimitable, a beautifully thought out collection of elegant craftsmanship.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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