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. I found the third story, Something Sweet on Our Tongues, to be a little too emotionally distant and reserved. While I still enjoyed it, the narrative is told in a first-person plural ("we") and this kept pushing me away from getting at the crux of the story or from understanding the main characters with the idea of we in mind. Let me emphasize that I am painfully aware of the cultural problems in the US. However, I cannot rate this book and its stories highly. I just did not appreciate the writing style which in the first two stories were written in a kind of letter format. Especially in the second story, it seemed like scolding.

My Monticello - Harvard Review

Gray, Anissa (2021-10-15). "Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's 'My Monticello' explores America's racist past — and present — with grace". The Washington Post . Retrieved 2021-10-16.

Book Summary

Guernica: The community built in “My Monticello” is intergenerational, from the very old and dying to the yet-to-be-born. It’s also very diverse — racially, ethnically, and in terms of national origin. What were you thinking about as you built this group, which grows over the course of the story? What was important to you about creating this community? 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 by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson review - The Guardian

Johnson: I absolutely love all my characters, even the hard-to-love people. I think that’s why I’m a public school teacher: I kind of love the person who’s a mess, and I love the person who is difficult. They’re all doing the best they can, even when they’re doing things I really wish they wouldn’t do; I hope that comes through. Some of the predicaments are bleak, but I don’t think the characters are. They all want something; they all want to be cared on; they all love or care about someone, or long for something. And I hope readers identify with that. Announcing the Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards". National Book Critics Circle. 2022-01-21 . Retrieved 2022-06-06. Staff reports. "Dove, Eastman, Johnson top winners at Library of Virginia Literary Awards". Richmond Times-Dispatch . Retrieved 2022-10-18.

BookBrowse Review

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. The title novella in My Monticello, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut collection of short fiction, is set in a dystopian future that mirrors the crises of our own day. Following a summer of wildfires, extreme heatwaves, and “a national election girded by massive demonstrations,” narrator Da’Naisha Hemings Love explains, the East Coast is hit with “great and terrible storms” that disrupt transportation, take down the power grid, and cause mobile phones to go “glitchy and dark in our palms.” As she says, “It was unclear if we were under siege, or whether the world was toppling under its own needless weight.” Fitzgerald, Isaac (September 28, 2021). "It's Never Too Late to Publish a Debut Book and Score a Netflix Deal". The New York Times . Retrieved October 30, 2021.

My Monticello: 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 | TIME My Monticello: 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 | TIME

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut novel, My Monticello, is a meditation on how the brutal past – and, in particular, the legacies of slavery – can be felt in the present.Having given you my opinion, I DO want you to know that the likes of Roxanne Gay, Colson Whitehead and Charles Yu have praised this book to the skies. So don't listen to me; see for yourself. Note: I read a copy of this novella alone, though it will be issued as apart of a collection of the author's stories under the same title. Egelman, Sarah Rachel (October 5, 2021). "My Monticello: Fiction". Book Reporter . Retrieved 2021-10-16. The book is interested in how people react when the systems of society break down – by drawing together or pulling apart… 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?

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Goodreads

Narrated in epistolary style, the darkly satirical “Control Negro” is the strongest of the five short stories. The main character is a professor who seeks to understand just how much race (and racism) matter to life outcomes. To answer this question, he decides he needs “a Control Negro” free from the disadvantages of his own childhood. 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. Strand, Karla (2021-10-01). "October 2021 Reads for the Rest of Us - Ms. Magazine". Ms. Magazine . Retrieved 2021-10-16. In 2017, a white supremacist drove his car headlong into a peaceful group opposing a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring dozens of others. There was widespread horror and outrage as footage of broken bodies bouncing off the car was broadcast around the world. But what if the tragedy did not shame local white nationalists, but embolden them? Such is the premise of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s riveting debut novel, which is set in the near future with the deadly assault in Charlottesville still in living memory.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.” Da’Naisha is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s “darker but not very dark never-wife,” whose six children were all fathered by the man who held her in bondage. The refugees fleeing from violent white supremacists establish a settlement in the home their ancestors were forced to build. The plot is one of the novella’s greatest strengths; through it, Johnson examines climate change and racism, as well as interracial relationships and alliances. 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. Johnson is a great observer. The novel is full of stunningly precise figurative language. This line, for example, early on in the narrative: “I saw that Devin had been injured: glass spiked along his forearm like bony plates on the spine of some extinct creature.” Describing a pair of non-identical twins, Ezra and Elijah, who are members of the group, she writes: “The twins looked like brothers, but not like the same person, as if one began where the other ended.” As the group walks through Piedmont, they find “the carcasses of a den of baby foxes in the pasture, their decaying bodies alive with flies”.