To start a Walter Mosley novel is like sitting down to a feast ... Lucia Napoli-Jones is such a vivid, vibrant presence in John Woman ... she is easily Mosley’s best secondary character since Mouse Alexander ... As usual, Mosley’s superpower lies in his slantwise take on the world and his characters, of whom there are dozens, and every one is memorable, even if they speak only a line or two ... this fantastic, surprising, humane and somewhat perverse book is one of Mosley’s best.

History and its manipulation is the all-consuming center of Walter Mosley’s new genre-bending novel ... There’s nothing but nits to pick with this book, and those land squarely within the realm of personal taste. A case can be made that many developments hinge on a preternatural amount of planning, and at times, the sex scenes veer into eye-rolling cheese ... he seamlessly combines elements of dystopian thrillers, psychological crime, philosophical fiction, and straightforward melodrama. His rich, earthy prose burrows through complex abstract ideas and suspenseful plot twists with equal utility.

This postmodern, literary story has the potential to bewilder or delight ... While a crime is at its core, John Woman is not a crime novel. It’s a full-blown literary endeavor, with all the pluses and minuses that may entail ... A literary novel is a character-driven thing, with plot subordinate. The downside to this is that the plots don’t always make sense. Convenient coincidences that place the character in a position to exhibit the emotion or trait the author wants at a given time lurk around every corner ... In the end, it’s all too convenient to be satisfying ... Passages that inspire head scratching are followed by authorial asides to ensure you get this point. That can work within reason, but done too often, it disturbs the vivid fictive dream the best books strive to achieve in the reader ... Passages that inspire head scratching are followed by authorial asides to ensure you get this point. That can work within reason, but done too often, it disturbs the vivid fictive dream the best books strive to achieve in the reader ... There’s a momentum to the writing that pulls the reader through to the end.

John Woman poses many questions: What does it mean to be good or evil? What is power? What is accountability? What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Throughout this story about stories, these questions are asked and answered. But are they really? For example, later in the book, Mosley occasionally uses the names 'John' and 'CC' interchangeably. So who is John Woman? Each time Mosley sets him up to move in one direction, he throws us by sending him somewhere else and reminding us again of John’s thesis that history is unreliable. Mosley’s writing is like good jazz, full of the unexpected. This award-winning artist gives us an original story with philosophical ponderings and a penetrating look at race, sexuality, class and education. In the end, John Woman is about the age-old question 'Who am I?' and the multitude of variables that come into play when one attempts an answer.

There’s a starkness to the writing that’s hard to get used to at first, but once enveloped in Jones’s world, sentences flow more smoothly. An irritating trend of introducing each new character by what they’re wearing slows the story, though. John Woman excels as a novel of ideas. Professor Woman engages with some truly unorthodox ways of thinking about history, and it’s clear that the book’s primary interest is sharing these ideas with the world. The text’s verbatim lectures can be tedious, but they also often pique interest. The latter half of the book contains enough mystery and thriller elements to remain engaging. Walter Mosley’s latest book is literary fiction of a different kind—partly a thriller about a man with a checkered past, and partly an allegorical tale about the role that history plays in our lives.

Mosley is at his commanding, comfort-zone-blasting best in this heady tale of a fugitive genius. His hero’s lectures are marvels of intellectual pyrotechnics and provocative inquiries; intense sex scenes raise questions about gender roles and intimacy; and John Woman’s increasingly drastic predicament and complex moral quandary precipitate arresting insights into race, freedom, power, and the stories we tell to try to make sense of the ceaseless torrent of human conflict and desire.

...[a] tightly wound combination of psychological suspense and philosophic inquiry ... he weaves elements of both the erotic and the speculative into a taut, riveting, and artfully edgy saga of a charismatic and controversial history professor at a mythical southwestern university ... Somehow, it makes sense that when Walter Mosley puts forth a novel of ideas, it arrives with the unexpected force of a left hook and the metallic gleam of a new firearm.

Fast paced but still full of provocative questions about society, the story grounds the wilder aspects of its plot by providing a fascinating cast of endearing characters. Mosley’s novel is one to savor, and an unpredictable, unabashedly strange good time.