A startling and powerful debut collection ... Our proximity is part of the astonishment of this story, which thrusts upon us an intimacy with Monticello’s many physical spaces ... Up close, we cannot ignore our present-day complicity with history even as the novella moves propulsively toward tomorrow’s inevitability. Simply put, a masterly feat ... The novella reminds us of what fiction does best: reflect our reality back at us just when we need it most. My Monticello aches with both resonance and timeliness, engaging in rich conversation with recent, real-life events never far from our minds ... The preceding stories in the collection, prescient and wide-ranging, depict finely drawn Black characters awash in microaggressions even as they strive to be and have more ... [Johnson's] deep connection to the state — its land, its landmarks, its history, its cruelty and its beauty — thrums throughout. It’s exhilarating to imagine the stories still to come from this gifted bard of a site whose remains she knows so well.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses history to spectacular effect in her debut fiction collection ... What makes My Monticello particularly resonant is that it does not stray far from life as we know it today. In the near future conjured by Johnson, there are the heat waves and wildfires that bring climate change into view. There is fallout from a fraught election. There is the vile replacement theory rhetoric of the right wing. But the lives of Johnson’s richly drawn characters—their personal stories—are always in focus. And, because of it, the storytelling is propulsive, as we follow these refugees along a harrowing journey, with danger ever at their heels. My Monticello is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it.
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 ... 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 ... 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 ... both unprecedented and inimitable, a beautifully thought out collection of elegant craftsmanship.
The narrative is swift and steadfast, and I didn’t have much time to dwell on such ponderings because the writing was so moving and controlled. My Monticello is not a novel; it's made up of five short stories and one long story—a novella nearly ... full of wisdom and the woes of our neighbors and our fellow humans. But there is no need for gilding here; everything is raw and beautiful—in its terrifying truth. Instead, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson takes her pen (Seamus Heaney’s fabled shovel) and digs into the dirt, the history of Virginia. Like a museum, a book can hold treasures, but these insights and artifacts are not behind glass; they are before you, living and occurring in the present day. Johnson furthers the Southern tradition, widening its scope and giving us something new to examine and learn from.
On each page, My Monticello amplifies William Faulkner’s famous reflection: 'The past is not dead. It’s not even past' ... Short, precise sentences match the urgency of the story, and this economy seems also to inform the dialogue. Brief exchanges are incomplete; the dialogue at times more closely resembles a series of monologues, as each escapee is consumed with worry about the likely outcome of their situation ... Notwithstanding the fervour of the tale, the narrator’s tone is cool and unruffled, even as she’s riven with the secret of her pregnancy ... My Monticello is a bleak story but reading it elicits the same kind of sensation that comes from listening to a poignant blues song: there is pleasure in its creation without denying the pain of the subject.
... capitalizes on the ongoing fascination with dystopian tales but uses it to explore themes of race, inheritance and community ... The novella and each of these stories are sharp in their critique of American culture and history, yet they are tenderhearted in their portrayal of characters faced with injustice and hate and buoyed by love, acceptance, potential and the recognition of intrinsic worth ... Johnson’s book is fantastically written and honest with every word. Each of the stories are stunning in their emotional range, detail and scope, with compelling plots and characters that feel all too real. It grapples with issues of race and belonging in new and insightful ways and is highly recommended.
... a bold collection...[that gives]readers a feeling of belonging in these stories, regardless of their race. Particularly, she gives white readers the opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of these characters. The crowning glory is the eponymous novella, My Monticello ... The group of people come to look upon the former plantation as their home, a sort of property of the people, or 'our' Monticello, but the generosity of the people who are truly entitled to ownership of the house is most astounding.
The title novella is by far the most compelling piece in Johnson’s collection. Although the accompanying short stories—also set in Virginia—explore stimulating questions about Black identity, several of them feel like assignments for a creative writing class on experimental styles of narration ... Although the short stories in Johnson’s debut are generally formulaic and underdrawn, the title novella’s resonant themes and smooth prose are powerful enough to make My Monticello a stunner. When Johnson turns her skill to longer-form and more developed work, she will be poised to make a major contribution to contemporary American literature.
... while there are twists in the plot, the best surprises come from how Johnson manipulates the symbols and signifiers of Jefferson’s estate ... The author has a way with moments — the literary equivalent of narrowing her lids and giving a side-eye ... Johnson was a teacher in the Charlottesville public schools for many years, and her talent at portraying characters and situations that are sympathetic, frustrating, hopeful, thoughtful, angry, deluded, and inspired all at once must, in part, have been developed from many years of observation in a classroom ... Johnson makes it clear that this narrative is its own declaration ... The journalist Tracy Thompson wrote that, in the South, 'the line between ‘history’ and ‘current events’ is notoriously hard to draw.' My Monticello is a thrilling demonstration of how surreal and intimate that faint boundary truly is.
Johnson mesmerizes the reader with the novella-length 'My Monticello,' in which a group of Charlottesville neighbors are run from their homes by violent white supremacists ... 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.
... starts in a pacy, quick-cut style, then settles into a more reflective mode ... by the end you can see why Johnson’s novel is being adapted by Netflix: violence blends with compassion, and ambiguity with inevitability. My Monticello is short, satisfying and punchy: more debuts should be like this.
Masterly ... 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.
The title novella that closes Johnson’s debut book is stellar and could easily stand on its own ... Not all of the remaining stories have the same force, but Johnson has a knack for irony and inventive conceits ... In a few taut pages, Johnson uses the setup to explore not just institutional racism, but fatherhood, fatalism, policing, and social engineering ... A sharp debut by a writer with wit and confidence.
This is a striking, if sometimes strident, novel ... chilling, affecting and intelligent, but it does seem to be critic-proofed. Who, after all, would criticise a novel that calls out racism? That said, there is a difference between agreeing with the moral and political propositions of a book and understanding its status as an act of literature ... sparse and indignant, pared back and simmering ... I would very much have liked more about Da’Naisha and Knox’s relationship, in that he veers between being genuinely concerned about his white privilege (and is even estranged from his father through dating someone of colour) and his incapacity not to patronise ... The problem with the novel is not in intent, but in structure. I read through it expecting two closures ... A first person narrative in which the person never seems to be writing, or telling us why they are writing, can be slightly off-key ... the absence of any scenes where the narrator actually puts pen to paper or types renders it slightly unsatisfying. The battle is coming, but we are never told the outcome. This is deft, but also a dodge. Would these people take up arms against those who would harm them? ... The characters are always identified by the problematic notion of skin. Johnson runs through a whole spectrum of ways of describing skin colour, but there is one consistency. Black is always Black, where brown, olive, honey, golden, pale, white are all in lower case. One can see the point: this is an assertion of Black identity. Nevertheless, it jars. Hierarchies are not disrupted by reversing them. For all its virtues, My Monticello is relentless in driving home its message, often at the expense of expanding the secondary characters. I could not tell you much about the personality of the twins, the religious neighbour, the students activists on the run, the fascists. Most of us have had the memo. What we require is the humanity.
... tenderly rendered ... As the group hunker down, rationing their food and increasingly vulnerable, the narrative starts to feel diffuse, but Johnson is an unusually sensitive writer, combining a mood of impending doom with language of soulful beauty.
