My Monticello

My Monticello is a visceral and at times hard-to-read novella, but it’s also a story which is difficult to put down.

The plot is apocalyptic, chronicling a black woman’s escape from a violent neo-Nazi group in the near future. Set in Charlottesville in the U.S., it focuses on her struggle to flee, along with her neighbours. They eventually settle in Jefferson’s plantation home, Monticello, where their ancestors were slaves in the eighteenth century. The irony of white supremacists hounding black Americans into a presidential building to escape racial violence was not lost on me while reading this novella.

The pace of the writing and the lush description kept me turning pages so quickly I read this within four hours. The tension of the narrator being in love with two men while being secretly pregnant at the same time also made me read faster. It’s a love story with a twist, and it really makes you think about race riots from a different perspective. I also love that the cover has a black woman featured on it, apparently still a rare image for a book by a female black author.

Thank you to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Random House UK, and NetGalley, for this ARC in return for an honest review. My Monticello is available to pre-order and will be published on 4th November 2021.

To be a person of colour in America is to be never safe as there will always be white people who want you dead. My Monticello imagines a scenario where the white people come for you with guns, emboldened by rhetoric. It is set in Virginia, around the home of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was both a Founding Father and a slaver. He never planned for rights to be extended for all.
My Monticello is a tense exploration of what happens when descendants of Sally Hemings and their neighbours are forced to take refuge in Jefferson's old house, built on the blood of slaves. It is what would happen if Trump's followers had their way. Men would rampage through the streets, looking for someone to lynch as they did with Emmett Till. I was afraid reading this book, as it read like a nonfiction account of the near future.

I love a book where you end up spending as much time googling the real life history behind the novel as reading the book itself! My Monticello is such a book. Set in the future in the US, a group of local residents flee their local neighbourhood with escalating racial violence surrounding them. They seek refuge in the historic Monticello, the historic slave plantation of Thomas Jefferson. There they form their own community fearing the violence they’ve left behind.
Raw, powerful and a great contemporary voice.

I really loved this novella - the near future it describes is scarily plausible and the premise is a fascinating one. It’s one of the more subtle discourses on race in America that I’ve read in the past couple of years but it makes its point effectively and beautifully. Highly recommended, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Naisha and her boyfriend are visiting her beloved grandmother when First Street is filled with marauding white supremacists, storming the neighbourhood in their SUVs, armed to the teeth. They’ve no choice but to run, three young black men fending off their attackers as they board an abandoned bus. Naisha drives towards Monticello, home to Thomas Jefferson and his many slaves, the ancestor of MaViolet and Naisha. At first, the company stations itself at Monticello’s welcome pavilion, unwilling to breach this bastion of the nation, but as the days wear on they make their way up the hill to the house. After a disastrous foray, it’s clear the city’s mayhem has only become worse. Nothing to be done but prepare to fight as the mob inches towards their refuge.

Johnson’s choice of venue is potently symbolic as is Naisha and MaViolet’s lineage, descendants of one of the nation’s founding fathers and his slave Sally Hemings. Without explicitly referencing the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the subject of Donald Trump's infamous, provocative remarks, she unfolds events from Naisha’s perspective, a bright young woman whose very presence at a prestigious university offends right wing extremists, choosing to give her a white liberal boyfriend. All of this could very easily have backfired but Johnson handles her subject deftly, telling her story in vivid prose against a backdrop of social disintegration, pulling the thread of suspense taut as the novella edges towards its conclusion. An audacious debut, daring and ambitious, which deserves the praise heaped upon it,

I love this book. It was smart, funny, and full of rich, vivid characters that stayed with me long after I had finished reading it. I would highly recommend it and, indeed, will be buying it for all of my friends as soon as I can.

Set in a dystopian near-future, this novella tells of white supremacists taking over a black and mixed race community in Virginia and what happens to a small group of neighbours who flee their town and take refuge in what was once the residence of Thomas Jefferson and is now a museum. Johnson's writing is vivid and bold. An impressive debut.

My thanks to Random House UK, and NetGalley for this ARC.

My Monticello is set a fictional version of Charlottesville, USA when a brutal terrorist attack is launched by white supremecists. For nineteen days, a group of residents flee their homes to escape the danger and take refuge in the historic plantation once owned by Jefferson, and the ancestor of Da'Naisha who is now hiding there. As they struggle to survive not only their new companions and their unexpected homelessness, but their fears that their home will never be the same again,

Strikingly poignant, Johnson shines a light on the racism and prejudice that is growing not just in the US but in all shadowy corners of the globe. Each character brings their own beautiful personalities, their own set of struggles from falling in love with the wrong people to feeling lost in the world and the group grow into their own type of family in such a wonderful way - bringing just a glimmer of hope to a hopeless world that if we just try a little harder for each other, we can pull through anything.

Of course this was deeply unsettling, I think there was a part of me that wasn't sure how to feel about using the Charlottesville attacks as a basis for a fictional story, but the uncomfortable truth is this story holds important social relevance especially right now and definitely deserves a spot on your reading list.

There is so much to love in this short, moving novel: its quiet, unassuming beauty; its relentless plot; its strong characters; its nuanced interrogation of what we inherit from our forebears; and the central question it poses: what do we choose to do when the world around us is burning? My Monticello is deeply rooted in American history, revolving as it does around the legacy of slavery and the very contemporary violence of white supremacists, but its accents are universal. Through her central character, a descendant of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson interrogates who we are and what makes us. The cruelty and animalistic behaviour directed towards the Black characters in this novel is described as exactly what it is: a cruelty towards humanity as a whole. To this ugliness, My Monticello responds with the ability to keep seeing love and beauty, as well as with the fierce willingness to not give up and fight, even when the battle seems hopeless. A truly astonishing debut.

This is an utterly astonishing book which is both highly imaginative and deeply engaged with America's troubled past, present and future. The novel is short, pacy and action-packed, but written in stunning prose which is frequently moving and profound.

'My Monticello' opens with what would be the climax of many novels: the narrator and her neighbours from Charlottesville, Virginia, fleeing in an abandoned bus from a violent attack on their street by white supremacists, and seeking refuge in Monticello, the historic hilltop home of Thomas Jefferson. We are thus immediately catapulted into a post-apocalyptic version of the near future in which racial tensions have escalated to the level of civil war.

The version of America which Jocelyn Nicole Johnson depicts is firmly rooted in its past, however; the narrator, Da'Naisha is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, who was his slave, so there is a sense of reclamation in Da'Naisha and her grandmother MaViolet seeking refuge on their ancestral home. This allows for an exploration of intergenerational trauma, as Da'Naisha reflects that "I inherited my knowing from Momma, and from MaViolet before her: I was born knowing." Elsewhere, describing the white supremacists, she reflects ""They thought we owed them. They believed their security depended on making sure we never felt safe, not even in our own bodies."

There are insights like this throughout the novel, which often make for uncomfortable reading, and yet there is also something hugely redemptive about the love with which Da'Naisha writes about her fellow fugitives. Johnson creates a sense of hope through the fragile community which is formed at Monticello, the bonds of love between them and their determination to resist the evil which is never far away from them.

This is one of the most powerful and brilliantly original novels about race in America I have read, which packs a huge amount into its slender page count. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.

Well written story about American history,

The authors passion for the subject is clear and I like the way the house is cleverly used in the plot.

Ambitious writing, worth a read.

My Monticello is a short novel ( less than 200 pages) but it packs a punch.
Set in a fictional near future Da’Naisha and her community are driven out of their Carolina neighbourhood by white supremacist gangs after the American economy has gone into free fall. They take refuge in Monticello, the former plantation of President Jefferson, terrified about what will happen next.
Da’Naisha is a descendent of Jefferson from his relationship with Sally Hemings, who was one of his slaves, so she has a particularly complex relationship with the house. As they use the finery the house has to offer, they are constantly reminded of the slaves that sustained Jefferson’s life there. They soon realise that their safety is a mirage and they will have to prepare to fight for their lives.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is a fine writer, she handles the story with gravitas and rigour, never allowing the terror and hysteria of the characters’ situation to overwhelm the novel. She interweaves a love triangle between Da’Naisha, her white college boyfriend and her ex cleverly into the story and uses it to highlight the complexity of relationships when colour, education and ambition are involved. Da’Naisha’s relationship with her dying grandmother, MaVoilet is movingly portrayed, who is depending on who?
The book ends suddenly with no resolution but it leaves you with much to consider and fear for our future, but also with hope that there are strong activists in our world who will continue to make a difference.
Thank you to #penguinbooks for inviting me to read this ARC
#netgalley

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is harrowing, brilliant, apocalyptic.

Her world is turned upside down by white supremacists in the night with flaming torches and threats to kill. University student Da'Naisha Love is forced to flee from her home in darkness with her aging grandmother, her boyfriend and neighbours including her former boyfriend.

They find refuge in Monticello, the estate of former founding father Thoms Jefferson. Da'Naisha knows her heritage well from her late mother but has never spoken about it publicly until she shares it with her refugee group in this auspicious location.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's My Monticello is harrowing but very brilliantly told. It is a history lesson for those of us unfamiliar with Thomas Jefferson's story but also it foretells a very dark future that we must all ensure does not become true!