My Monticello

Product Information

If you buy one book in October, it should be this one. MY MONTICELLO is a collection of short stories and a novella that explore race, identity, and more. Beautifully written, nuanced, and insightful, they each make you think. My introverted self found myself wishing for a book club so I could discuss these stories with others. Pitch-perfect...riveting storytelling. This incandescent work speaks not just to the moment, but to history.” This was unfortunately another example of a fantastic premise not being fulfilled to the extent that it perhaps could have been (in my opinion). The main character, Da'Naisha is a descend of Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, creating an obvious link between their surroundings and her own personal history. She is also hunkering down amidst all this violence with her current boyfriend, grandmother and her ex, which gives rise to multiple issues during the story. I felt that the author focused too much on the wide cast of supporting characters which left less time than I liked spent with Da'Naisha and developing her character and story.

MY MONTICELLO | READ BY A FULL CAST | Macmillan Audio MY MONTICELLO | READ BY A FULL CAST | Macmillan Audio

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. Chilling, thought-provoking and expertly crafted… Johnson’s [stories] broke my heart as well as my brain." Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ...The professor fathers a son to serve as his experimental subject and observes him from afar. Sometimes he simply collects data, while at other times he tries to influence his son’s choices, by encouraging him, for instance, to participate in swimming rather than “the fraught cliché of basketball.” His goal is to “ prove [his son] was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” When the young man nears the end of college, the professor convinces himself that his son has “made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future.” Predictably, his hope doesn’t come to pass—instead, the young man becomes the victim of police brutality.

My Monticello - Wikipedia

Guernica: Can you talk more about Da’Naisha Love? How and why is it that she’s the one to lead this group in this moment, and to this place, Monticello? Guernica: Tell us about the origin of “My Monticello,” the titular story in your collection. What were the seeds, and how did it bloom in the way that it did? A compilation of vivid, complex stories, at times reminiscent of works by Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead” It is ultimately this love, if anything, that can sustain the group in the isolation of the mountain, as they are hunted down by the white supremacist militia – and by the legacy of racism which accompanied the stirring idealism of Jefferson. Staff reports. "Dove, Eastman, Johnson top winners at Library of Virginia Literary Awards". Richmond Times-Dispatch . Retrieved 2022-10-18.And Monticello, where they stop on their way to the Piedmont Mountains, is the slave plantation of one of the founding fathers of America, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Da’Naisha is a descendant of Jefferson through his historically documented affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. That Johnson chooses to make her protagonist a descendent of Jefferson reveals the twin legacies of the man in contemporary America: Da’Naisha embodies the desire for freedom, but she is also cursed by the legacy of slavery.