A review by serendipitysbooks
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

 
Can I just say that Hell of a Book is a hell of a book and leave it at that?

No?

What I will say then is that it took me a while to find my feet with this novel. There are three main narrative threads which initially seem fairly disparate. We have an author on a cross-country book tour, promoting his book called … Hell of a Book. There are the conversations he has with The Kid, a young Black boy who pops up repeatedly during the book tour and who can’t be seen by everybody. Then there is Soot, a young Black boy raised by loving parents who do all they can to protect him from the realities of being Black and to keep him safe. Yet he is bullied at school due to the darkness of his skin and they know that is the least of the issues he will face as he grows up. As I tried to work out how these threads would combine the unreliable nature of the narrator further complicated matters. What was real and what was not?

Another thing that threw me off was the constantly changing tone. The opening scene is rather madcap - the author being pursued down a hotel corridor by an irate husband who found his wife and the author in bed. There are plenty more madcap moments on the book tour. But there are also Catch-22 moments (especially in scenes connected to publishing and marketing), wisecracks and dark humour. And interspersed with this are moments that feel like a punch in the gut - parents who teach their son to be invisible or play games seeing how quickly he can respond to a “hands up” command, all in an effort to keep him safe. As a reader these switches were dizzying.

By the end the three storylines had come together in a powerful way and any feelings of being unmoored had left. Not only that but I came to appreciate the feeling of being unsettled as a crucial part of the reading experience.

For underpinning all three story threads, all the humour, all the gut punches, was the issue of race in the United States and of police brutality in particular. Hell of a Book powerfully exposes racial issues and their impact on hearts, minds and souls, especially those of Black boys and Black men. And why should anyone feel settled or comfortable with that reality? 
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