My Monticello

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I was a public school teacher for 20 years and I’m a huge proponent of community. I’ve had classes where all kinds of people who might not otherwise have a lot in common create some sort of relationship and unity. I definitely tried to highlight that in the book. I really used the ideas of teaching to shape how my protagonist, Da’Naisha Love, tries to get her group of neighbours to work together in this very tense situation. She has them do what a teacher would do on the first day of school – they commit to a list of things they all do together, to get by.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Goodreads

Strand, Karla (2021-10-01). "October 2021 Reads for the Rest of Us - Ms. Magazine". Ms. Magazine . Retrieved 2021-10-16.The First Street neighbourhood has a tight, communal spirit: “Older kids keeping an eye on the younger ones,” Da’Naisha observes, “like we were all cousins.” And this spirit endures once they’ve been uprooted from their homes. As they make their journey through Monticello and into the mountain, the group agrees to “collect and share all the food and drink we found on the mountain”.

My book is me nudging forward from Jocelyn Nicole Johnson: ‘My book is me nudging forward from

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. The biggest challenge was thinking about the psychological and emotional costs of racism and extremism. It meant putting myself in the same mental space as my characters, being isolated and run out of home. That was hard to contemplate for characters that I grew to really like and care about. The night before the rally, groups of armed men started to turn up This story definitely has its merits and I learned a lot through reading it, but as a piece of entertainment (selfishly my principal goal in reading this one) it didn’t quite knit together for me. After a hectic beginning it's slow to develop and though I was eventually moved by what took place it took a long time for me to reach this level of engagement. Da’Naisha is the character who is designed to draw the reader in and this did work, but dialogue is strangely absent for much of the story and when it is present it consists mainly of one-liners and the odd casual comment. Therefore, I can only award this one three stars, though I predict I might be an outlier in rating this one so modestly. Guernica: You skirt an edge, particularly in “Control Negro” and “My Monticello,” between the present and a very near future, where what’s come to pass feels both unthinkable and also completely, frighteningly possible. We also see, in “My Monticello,” glimpses of what has occurred, including the Unite the Right rally and the murder of Heather Heyer. Can you talk about these gestures and the connections you make between our current reality and an imagined near future? This utterly absorbing novel – already set for a Netflix adaptation – is thus not just a meditation of how the brutal past of slavery still has a potent legacy in contemporary America; it also portrays the redemptive powers of love and care: “Why is it we love what we love?” Da’Naisha ponders near the end. “I felt such love at that moment, for every soul in that place, because they were like me and different. Because we’d become a part of one another.”

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Current Winners of the Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia". Loyal Jones Appalachian Center . Retrieved 2022-06-06. My Monticello is a suspenseful novella that presents us with a scarily imaginable scenario (given all the alt-right & neo-nazi rallies that have happened in the last couple of years & the Capitol assault) where a group of violent white supremacists engulf Charlottesville. Our narrator, Da'Naisha Love, escapes the violence and finds a momentary refugee in Monticello, which happens to be Thomas Jefferson's historic plantation. Alongside her are strangers, her white boyfriend, her elderly grandmother, and other people from her neighbourhood. Over the course of nineteen days, this cobbled group tries to carry on. Their fear is palpable, and more than once they find themselves faced with possible threats from the outside. Tensions run high and various members within the group inevitably find themselves disagreeing over what to do.