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.