My Monticello

Fiction

By: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Narrated by: Aja Naomi King, January LaVoy, Landon Woodson, LeVar Burton, Ngozi Anyanwu, Tomiwa Edun

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner

Read by a full cast of narrators, featuring LeVar Burton and Aja Naomi King

“A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle

"...'My Monticello' is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it." — The Washington Post

Winner of the Weatherford Award in Fiction
A winner of 2022 Lillian Smith Book Awards

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”

United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable collection that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

Poignant

What happens if we let hate prevail. But against hope we hope that the good in mankind will prevail. Beautiful writing. Looking forward to the Netflix adaptation.

Speechless

This collection of stories by Johnson were incredible, bringing in different aspects of inter-sectionality and creating characters so vivid that readers are convinced they are real. The short stories were great and the novella was very interesting. I was not a big fan of the ending of the novella which is why I gave the story four stars instead of five. The ending left me wanting more and sad that the story was so quick to end. It’s a great piece of work that I think will be remembered for years to come. The oral performance was magnificent and the voice actor especially for My Monticello did incredibly well. I definitely recommend this for anyone even slightly interested in racial issues, speculative fiction, romance, and history. Great work!

Beautiful, almost lyrical prose. A guide for our current times. Motivating and enlightening.

Loved the short stories and the novel. Each one tender and humanities. The work of a novelist, in my view.

Dark and gloomy reading

Really enjoyed this, but it made my heart heavy as hell. The main story My Monticello is extraordinarily haunting and I enjoyed her breathy performance

Very impactful fiction or reality of different cultures

This work of fiction has made me consider the need for many of us to explore our beliefs and actions supporting them unless I am reading too much into this story.