Hell of a Book

by: Jason Mott
Published: Jun 29, 2021
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Race
323 Pages, E-Book
GoodReads Link

This book was hard to get through, it took me over a week to finish! Not because of the difficulty of the writing but because of the content of the story and the protagonist – who is unnamed throughout the entire book.

Here are a few of my issues:

The (unnamed) protagonist is not a well-adjusted adult and behaves like a drunken fool for the majority of the book. He is an awful person to be around and it is surprising that he has had a semi-successful career for as long as he did.
The whole story was hard to read and follow as it bounces between two perspectives: the protagonist and a young boy referred to as Soot or The Kid.
I never quite understood what the book was about.
The hallucinations were too much which also led to this being hard to read (see #2). It was hard to grasp what was really happening and what was being imagined. It also didn’t help this case that the protagonist was inebriated most of the time.
The protagonist needs therapy badly. Full stop.
The talk about police killings was triggering. We live this in real life, I didn’t want to read about it too especially because the protagonist doesn’t do or say anything positive to push the conversation forward.

Maybe I didn’t “get” it. Maybe I’m not “woke” enough. Maybe the context went over my head. I should give it 0 stars.

One-Word Summary: Triggering