Reviews for Hell of a book A novel. [electronic resource] :

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

A Black writer (the Writer) with a tenuous grip on reality endures a Dantean book tour. A boy named Soot (the Kid) learns that in a white world, Black safety depends on invisibility. The Writer is instructed by his publicist, “The last thing people really want to hear about is being Black. Being Black’s a curse—no offense—and nobody wants to feel cursed when they read something they just finished paying $24.95 for.” Soot’s father laments the hard racial truths he must impart to his son, knowing that “[w]ith each word, his son would be capable of a little less love, capable of a little less imagination, capable of a little less life.” As their stories collide, the Kid begins to haunt the Writer, appearing unexpectedly to share his traumatic anxieties and pose impossible questions. In his fourth novel, which veers from skewering satire to unspeakable sorrow, Mott (The Crossing, 2018) dangles his readers over a precipice of uncertainty. Is the Writer's book meant only to absolve white readers of their complicity? Maddening, disorienting, and illuminating.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A Black writer's cross-country book tour becomes a profound exploration of love, friendship, and racial violence in America. A man finds himself sprinting down the hallway of a Midwestern hotel, naked, a stranger (whose wife he's just been caught sleeping with) close on his heels. So begins our nameless narrator's book tour, which will take him around the country to promote his debut novel, Hell of a Book. As the author confronts the politics of publishing and marketing, he must answer to two very different perspectives: There are those, on the one hand, who believe in the impact of his book but wonder why he has chosen not to represent “the Black condition.” On the other hand, his media trainer advises, in a tone less flippant than sincere, that “the last thing people really want to hear about is being Black.” Meanwhile, he begins to form an unlikely friendship with a Black boy—a shadowlike, ever present 10-year-old he calls The Kid—as around them the country mourns another victim of police violence. Braided with the author’s narrative are chapters following the life of a boy referred to as Soot, which he's called by the kids in his rural Southern town on account of his very dark skin. Uncomfortable in his skin and bullied by his peers, Soot feels neither safe nor wanted in the world, withdrawing into himself and attempting to find some refuge in his imagination. When his father is murdered outside their family home, Soot finds safety in stories. As chapters alternate between the author’s and Soot’s perspectives, their narratives slowly begin to merge, unfolding into a story that is at once a paean to familial love and friendship and a reckoning with racism and police violence. By turns playful and surprising and intimate, a moving meditation on being Black in America. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Publishers Weekly
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Mott’s stunning fourth novel (after The Crossing) delves into the complex and fraught African American experience. The protagonist, a nameless Black author on his first book tour, is reeling from his newfound fame and the success of his book, Hell of a Book. As he flies to promotional events, often in a drunken stupor, the author reveals that his vivid imagination makes it difficult for him to distinguish reality from fiction. So when he encounters “The Kid,” a 10-year-old boy with impossibly ebony skin, the author doubts the boy is real. The Kid, who uncannily resembles a recent victim of police violence, first appears at a hotel and continues to pop up during the book tour, leading the author to recall his own repressed trauma as a bullied Black boy in North Carolina. The author’s sobering recollections of his youth are punctuated with humorous and insightful encounters that include a discussion on national sociopolitical identity with Nicolas Cage and an improbable first date with a funeral director. Mott’s poetic, cinematic novel tackles what it means to live in a country where Black people perpetually “live lives under the hanging sword of fear.” Absurdist metafiction doesn’t get much better. (June)

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