Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mlbalmeo 's review for:
My Monticello
by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Whoa. This was a tough one for me. Part of that may be because I picked it up with absolutely no context. I hadn't read reviews or sought it out, so I was caught off guard by its intensity. This novella reads a lot more like a long short story. Johnson focuses on the tense moments between two other moments, and tension is a good word to describe what reading this was like. I honestly felt like I was holding my breath the whole time. She does a pretty spectacular job making you really feel the anxiety. Definitely not a beach read. Yet, if you like other similar approaches to storytelling, like Colson Whitehead's "Nickel Boys" — short works that cover a pretty brief and singular moment in time — this is thought provoking. In the end, it felt like Johnson took real-world inspiration (the white supremacist who drove his car into a group of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville) and imagined the world that comes after that. She leads you to the conclusion that very few threads are holding the world together.