T. Geronimo JohnsonRezensionen

I picked this from a shelf with my eyes closed and had no expectations. The language was liquid and inventive and the plot moved quickly in interesting directions. D'aron reminded me of the protagonist in [b:The Topeka School|43565369|The Topeka School|Ben Lerner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555088207l/43565369._SY75_.jpg|67209658], but with more subtlety and depth. I suspect a re-read would be rewarding too.

I think this book had a lot of important stuff to say and that it spent a lot more time doing weird ham-fisted comedy/melodrama than saying important stuff about race and acceptance and ambiguity around those topics. What was supposed to work as comedy didn't really land for me as comedy, and the tricks with the conventions of fiction didn't land either. There were passages that I had trouble understanding at all because they seemed like in-jokes or just sort of went off into the weeds. On the whole, I wish the book had been tightened up a lot and had dwelled more on the serious issues addressed in a late brief diatribe, and on that really pretty gripping confrontation in the Holler, with its concluding and very telling punishment.

Meh.

3 students meet at UCB. All outcasts of some sort. one is a young white man from the south and they decide to re-enact the civil war in his home town with disastrous effects.
Seemed pushed, although interesting

The writing is uniformly arresting and the story is wrenching and perfect until the end of ch. 16. After this high dramatic point, the novel remains very, very good. Only, I felt Johnson let go of the reins a little. For my taste he let style and introspection take precedence over story. I wanted more events to happen than did in the last half of the novel. I wanted there to be more consequences for what happened in the first half. I wanted to have the marvelous clash of cultures and ideologies that Johnson set up in the first half to be fulfilled by an equally dramatic climax in the second. I wanted this book to be the Bonfire of the Vanities of the 21st century. Instead, the story retreated into something thoughtful, something nuanced, something personal; nothing like the big novel of social commentary I expected, and nothing like what I thought Johnson seemed to be gearing up for in the first half. It was a great read until the end, though--even if it wasn't exactly the read I wanted it to be.

I’m bothered by how low the aggregate Goodreads score is on this one. I think it’s because it’s scorched earth satire (think Spike Lee’s Bamboozled or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout). I thought it was a balancing act that couldn’t last, but it managed to, with a wobble or two, all the way to the end. I’d love to see it made into a film.

The concept is great, four college friends decide to return to Georgia to stage an intervention in a Civil War reenactment. Lots to think about while reading. Racism is rampant and Johnson has created a multi layered story that should have resonated better with me than it did. I had trouble deciding who was doing the talking and I had to reread and reread pages to understand.

Only made it through 18 pages. The kind of jazzy, slangy writing style isn't resonating with me now. Maybe it will another time.

This novel is a social satire rooted in current events related to racism and culture wars. The protagonist of the story is D'aron, a young white man from a rural Georgia community who escapes to study at University of California, Berkeley. Overwhelmed by the culture shock of "Berzerkeley," D'aron eventually finds solace in the company of three other misfits: Louis, a Malaysian student and comic; Charlie, a large black man from Chicago who looks like a football player but is actually preppy; and Candice, a white woman from Iowa who claims to be part Native American. When D'aron lets slip in class that his hometown stages an annual Civil War reenactment, the four come up with a plan a "performative intervention" by staging the lynching of a slave and filming interviews with the townspeople responding to the intervention. I shan't spoil the novel, but things go horribly wrong. Johnson is an equal-opportunity parodist, satirizing both the "backwards" white people of rural Georgia and their defense of their heritage, but also mocking the ways that academia wallows in theory that is disconnected from the reality of lived lives. What keeps the book from being merely a big scolding is that its four main characters are well-developed, believable, and interesting people. The latter part of the book after "the incident" is less interesting than the beginning as it gets bogged down in navel-gazing over what happened. Still it's an interesting story and commentary on contemporary society.½

A kid from the Deep South goes off to attend Berkeley, where he happens to mention to some of his friends the annual Civil War re-enactment that takes place in his home town. The friends are appalled, and one of them comes up with the idea of showing up at the event and staging a "performative intervention": a re-enactment of the lynching of an escaped slave, intended as a form of protest. This... does not go well.

This is a book I find myself with hard-to-pin-down mixed feelings about. At various points during the novel, I found myself thinking that the social commentary was a little too obvious, or a little too hard to interpret clearly, or nicely nuanced in a way that provides a lot to chew on but very few pat answers. (I suppose it's entirely possible that it is, in fact, all three.) I also thought the was writing sometimes clever and evocative, but sometimes too clever, too obscure, too overdone. In the end, I don't know if I enjoyed reading it (in whatever sense "enjoyed" is even the appropriate word for a story like this), or that I was entirely satisfied with it. But I do feel glad to have read it, I think.½

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson is a highly recommended novel that faces down some stereotypes and assumptions with amazing wit and insight.

D'aron Little May Davenport has left his hometown of Braggsville, Georgia, to attend college as far away from Georgia as he can get - the University of California, Berkeley. He and Louis Chang, his roommate and an aspiring comedian, meet Candice, an Iowan, and Charlie, a black prep school student at a dot party where the four are accused of being insensitive. Soon they become close friends and dub themselves the "4 Little Indians."

The four friends take a class called "American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives," which spurs them on to make their first political statement of outrage, which fails miserably. When D'aron mentions that Braggsville has a Civil War re-enactment the group decides to go to Georgia and stage a protest that is more a performance piece than based on any true social outrage. The performance goes terribly wrong and suddenly the students and the town are confronting some racial and social realities, as well as other ideological positions that they never anticipated.

Johnson opens the novel with a glossary of terms the students will be using, which should clue you in that this is mainly a humorous novel, even while it brings some serious topics to light. There are a lot of preconceptions of many makes and ideologies, all presented with keen insight and satire. Johnson presents real historical social situations and makes connections between them, while shifting from comedy to tragedy. The main exploration is of racism in the South and the tension that still exists.

This is a well written novel. I'll admit feeling a bit of distance from the characters at the beginning, as they seemed to me to be so very young and naive. As the novel progressed, I appreciated Johnson's skill much more because of the way he allows his characters to grow amidst all the contradictory elements we see around us in contemporary America.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.

Damn was I relieved to read the Goodreads reviews of Welcome to Braggsville and discover that reasonably intelligent people found this as hard to read as I did. I received this book in the Book Riot Best of 2015 Box but it was already on my to-read list so I can't even blame Book Riot for it.

It starts out strong - the reader is dropped in the middle of a group of people at a California University, all of whom feel like they don't fit in, who come together and form their own little band of misfits. But then there are all these weird random chapters where words are just repeated over and over again, or you get a ton of details about something that doesn’t feel important (and inevitably isn't important), or chapters that are stream of consciousness with numerous characters and it's never clear whose thoughts they are. These chapters are supposed to be playful or cutting edge or something, I assume, but for this reader they're just distracting. They did not add plot points and they seemed overall unnecessary.

Just as I was about to give up on this book, all of a sudden this . . . thing happened. I don't want to say what it is because it's an enormous plot point to give away but essentially this book that was about these kids who wouldn't normally mix, you know, mixing, was about . . . something else entirely. This was almost halfway into the book! It felt manipulative. I wondered why the hell the author had bothered with all these pages about other things when the story was way over there, as it turns out, but, in the end, it also worked on me. I was back on board.

And then it happened all over again. These interesting and complicated conversations on race and . . . other things, took a back-burner to weirdo chapters that served no purpose.

If I was rating Welcome to Braggsville chapter by chapter there'd be a hell of a lot of 5-star chapters and plenty of 1-star chapters. This was one of those books that I really, really wanted to love much more than I did. In the end, finishing it was a chore and I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson is not an easy book to read. No book that seeks to take an honest look at racism in America is easy to read. There is always so much hurt and pain, even when it is packaged with as much satire and humor as The Confederacy of Dunces. For me, though, the real difficulty was with the prose. I set it aside four times, struggling with the prose. I began to wonder if I was too old for the book. The prose is like jazz, scatting wildly through stream of consciousness narratives to academic goo-goo and all over the place. I lost myself in the text and lost my place time and again. And yet…

The prose is beautiful and Johnson has so much to say that is important and worthy. So, even if it is a struggle, it is worth it. And perhaps my struggle is caused as much by my head cold that makes my eyes ache and tear as it is by the wildness of the prose. After all, sometimes the words and the ideas just take my breath away.

This is the story of D’Aron or Daron Davenport of Braggsville, GA, pop. 712. He is not at home in Braggsville and escapes to Berzerkley, Oakland because, as he wrote in his application essay, “I like UC Berkeley because the only way I could get farther from home is to learn how to swim.” At Berkeley he forms a tight-knit bond with three other students, Luis Chang who hopes to be the Malaysian Lenny Bruce Lee, Candice who clings to her rumored Native American ancestry to overcome her IA whiteness, and Charlie, a black should-be athlete from Chicago. They get each other and their bonds grow ever tighter as they move through their freshman into their sophomore year.

The trouble began when D’aron’s American History X, Y, Z class takes up the subject of reenactments and he mentions that his hometown does one every year. Candice suggests they do a reenactment, too, one that would rebut the honoring our heritage mask of white supremacy. They decide to go there for Spring Break and in a “performative intervention” play the role of slaves complete with reenacting a lynching. Things go horribly wrong and a national scandal erupts complete with protesters and counter-protesters and national media camped out in front of the Davenport home.

See the rest of the review here
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/welcome-to-braggsville-by...

Shortly after I moved from North Carolina to the San Francisco Bay Area, I saw a promo for a TV documentary that described the Bay Area as "the epicenter of the 1960's Civil Rights Movement." It was my first inkling that the Bay Area thinks of itself as the center of a pre-Copernican universe, the celestial body around which all of the rest of humanity revolves.

A year or so later, my spouse and I were having dinner with a couple who introduced us to James Fowler's six (or seven, counting Stage 0) Stages of Faith. Over bok choy and warm water with lemon, they told us with all seriousness that most parts of the world, especially the American South, are at Stage 2 ("Mythic-Literal") while the Bay Area is at Stage 5 or Stage 6 (Stage 6 being "enlightenment"). (This couple also lived in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood because of the lower home prices and then hired a full-time Colombian nanny so they could send their daughter to private school and she would still learn Spanish.)

So, the weather is awesome, but the culture is a little full of itself. ("Why would you live anywhere else?")

As such, I was tickled when T. Geronimo Johnson imported a bit of Bay Area intellectual hubris to small-town Georgia. One has a legitimate complaint if one takes issue with the surface friendliness of the South, but one must also admit to the shallow-judgmentalism-masquerading-as-cultural-sensitivity that pervades the (incredibly segregated) San Francisco Bay Area.

Welcome to Braggsville elicited a response in me similar to the one I get reading Faulkner. On one level, this is the "What the hell is this?" reaction I had to the first several pages of both this book and The Sound and the Fury. It took me a while to get used to Johnson's style, and the absence of quotation marks still tripped me up on occasion to the end of the book. I say I like fiction that requires a little work on my part, but that doesn't mean I don't whine a bit when I first realize I can't just sail through a novel.

On another level, there's the subtle and not-so-subtle confrontation of race issues in the high humidity and rampant greenery of the South. I have much less doubt about Johnson's personal opinion on racism than I do about Faulkner's, but I appreciate the way that Johnson addressed the nuance and conflict within people who didn't make the system but perpetuate it by being born into it, whether that system is in California or in Georgia.

And then there's the thing where dead people have a voice. That's pretty Faulkner, too.

In the middle of all of this is the angst of being a young adult trying to find one's way, which is probably why I found myself considering not picking this back up even though I felt a strong pull towards reading more. At nearly forty, it seems I've still not come to terms with all of the stupid things I did and said during undergrad, and it's a little challenging for me to read such a realistic portrayal of the simultaneous doubt and over-confidence, the clumsy exploration of one's power and freedom (intellectual, sexual, etc.) and the limits thereof.

I wasn't a fan of the inquest scene (courtroom scenes rarely hold my interest) and some of the after-dark stuff that happens in Braggsville is still confusing to me, but overall I enjoyed riding along with Johnson on this tour of the U.S. of A.

In this book are so many issues of intimacy and relationships, both individual and institutional, and the influence we have both locally and more broadly whether we intend to have influence or not. But the idea I think I'll chew on the longest is the notion that sometimes the effects of an action take a long time to ripple out, and that sometimes a thing's worth doing even if it hurts.

D'aron Davenport leaves his backwoods area of Georgia that he never feels he fits in with, to join a diverse group of friends at Berkeley. Berkeley inspires the friends to an act of "performative intervention" at a Civil War reenactment in Braggsville. The book seems to satirize everything until things get real, real quick, making it important to focus on one thing more than others. On almost every page, it seemed like there was some sort of in-joke that I needed to be a part of D'aron's group to understand, or at least a nineteen year old in college and maybe even the right college. Reading sentences over and over again and still not understanding might be my problem, but I don't think it will leave many readers connected to this book as much as they could be. Less code words! I fear too many puzzles leave only Johnson with knowing the entire meaning of his words and that isn't what anyone wants. I feel like a failure knowing I didn't understand this as much as possible, but I did enjoy what I did understand. If you like this one, try Kiese Laymon's 'Long Division'.

I was pleased to receive this book as part of a Goodreads Giveaway. *Spoilers throughout*

Welcome to Braggsville is about four college friends who meet at Berkeley (D’aron a white southerner from Georgia who quit hunting to become a vegetarian; Charlie a black from Chicago educated at a private school; Candice a white liberal who is proud of her 1/8th Indian heritage; and Louis “Lenny Bruce Lee”, a Malaysian who has aspirations of being a comedian). During an alternative history class, Daron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War re-enactment and the four decide to travel there on spring break to stage a protest. Throughout the book D’aron, our narrator, walks us through the polar opposite worlds of Berkeley and Braggsville that each claim a part of his identity.

Right from the start I found myself engaging with this book’s lightly satirical tone. The author eloquently jests various political groups throughout, illuminating behaviors or beliefs that seem quirky (at best) or downright outlandish to centrists or outsiders. The tone is, however, not mean-spirited but rather gently pokes fun at its targets. I was reminded of Mark Twain and his amiable way of delivering criticism that is still welcoming to the wider audience. On those wacky San Franciscans, for instance:

“Happy meal toys and plastic bags were long outlawed and voters threatened circumcision and goldfish with the same fate. They’d once had a mayoral candidate named Jello”.

In an interesting post-script to the book, the author noted that his experience of being a black male was different in Maryland, California, and Georgia (and that being white is different there too). As the story moves south from California to Braggsville, this idea of race becomes ripe for exploration and right away some old Southern customs grace the pages that might surprise a naive northerner: e.g. black lawn jockeys being sported as landscape ornaments, or that the town's neighborhoods are still segregated along color lines. When a newly arrived Candice wonders where all the black people live in Braggsville, our comic relief Louis points and suggests: in the front yards.

The book as a whole becomes more serious at this point (due to a key plot event) allowing for the contemplation of some bigger ideas as the characters seek to find themselves in the aftermath (e.g, how the legacy of slavery is still present with us today, in ways subtler than you might think; how regionalism shapes us– specifically the way southerners are viewed in the north; the way sexuality can be just as defining as race to a black man like Charlie). When D’aron asks if things are different for him now that he has come out as gay, Charlie says

“The same but different. Used to be blacks weren’t bothered when I was around; everyone else was more likely to be. It’s reversed”.

So you can see, this book really covers some interesting territory. There are some great passages that delve into the complexity of the issues at hand. I also appreciated that the voice never lapsed into histrionics with regards to race or how easy targets were not made villains (e.g.; the reenactors). Unfortunately as the book neared the end, there were a few chapters that lost momentum for me (the “college paper” and henceforth), before thankfully regaining its poise just in time to land a great ending. Hence the four stars. Otherwise, highly recommended, and I look forward to more from this author.

Review of: Welcome to Braggsville, by T. Geronimo Johnson
by Stan Prager (12-12-15)

Rarely do we encounter a work of fiction so unique and thought-provocative that it seems to cut its very own groove in twenty-first century American literature, but such is the case in my opinion with Welcome to Braggsville, the brilliant and delightfully satirical second novel by T. Geronimo Johnson. The last time I was struck so favorably by an idiosyncratic work such as this was upon reading Junot Diaz’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and indeed both novels share an authenticity of voice that not only add credibility to the fictional narratives but actually define these in some sense as their very own sub-genres.
The central protagonist of Welcome to Braggsville is D’aron Davenport, a white rural native of the tiny hamlet of Braggsville, Georgia, population 712, who parlays academic excellence and a clever application letter laden with sarcasm into acceptance at the University of California, Berkeley. An outsider trying to gnaw his way inside what he fondly characterizes as “Berzerkeley,” D’aron finally succeeds in bonding with Candice, a principled and attractive white chick from Iowa desperate to assert her one-eighth Native American heritage; Charlie, an athletic black dude from the Chicago hood of questionable sexual orientation; and Louis, a comedic Malaysian character from San Francisco. When D’aron let’s drop that hometown Braggsville hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, he and his new friends – who have collectively dubbed themselves the “4 Little Indians” – uneasily conspire to stage a “performative intervention” protest, which, as events are to prove, decidedly does not go well.
It would not be giving away too much to reveal that Braggsville is a metaphor for the post-racial America that all of us – except perhaps for the snarky pundits on Fox News – have to acknowledge is anything but post-racial, and the “4 Little Indian” millennials represent a slice of its disparate denizens. Johnson, an African-American visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has managed through this superb and highly-original satire to write about race in America in a manner that somehow defies cliché and turns out to be both gut-wrenching and funny and ultimately tragic. I detected elements of William Faulkner’s Snopes novels, bits and pieces of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat Cradle phase, John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire era, and even echoes of Allan Gurganus in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, but Welcome to Braggsville is most definitely not derivative. In contrast, Johnson’s innovative style seduces the reader with a multilayered narrative that in the end effectively distills both the awkwardness and the perfidy of entrenched racism that not only still characterizes America in 2015 but ultimately defines it.
Midway through the novel, D’aron’s father, in ridiculing a Berkeley class syllabus, indicts both racism and political-correctness, and thereby points to an uncomfortable truth that cannot help but make all of us squirm just a little bit: “I don’t need to go to college for this stuff. I woulda told you this, son: People generally aren’t too fond of people who are different. No one can warm to everybody. That ain’t never gonna change. Only thing’ll change is what counts as different, from time to time. So, try to take ‘em as individuals. Know you can’t fix the world. Get rid of niggers, you get coloreds. Get rid of coloreds, you got blacks. Get rid of blacks, you got African-Americans. It’s all the same if you don’t like ‘em. See, ‘cause if you don’t like ‘em, you’ll make some new shit that’s too clever for them to know all fuck what’s happening. Like Ed down in purchasing, he calls ‘em Mondays. You think that changes what’s in the man’s heart? … No. Why Mondays? … Nobody likes Mondays.” [p239-40]
Every paragraph is not as profound or stylized as that one, and like even the finest literature there are identifiable flaws here and there, but the overall package is nothing short of magnificent. If you want to read a novel that transcends the ordinary and serves up a salient chunk of a quintessential disorder that plagues contemporary America, then I highly recommend that you read Welcome to Braggsville. If you do, I can promise that it will stay with you – not unlike race in America – long after you thought you were done with it.

http://regarp.com/2015/12/12/review-of-welcome-to-braggsville-by-t-geronimo-john...

i just... don't know. i was really looking forward to this book, and have been so impressed by johnson. but sometimes you encounter a read that fees like it doesn't really want to let you in. i couldn't find my way into this story, so that's a big frustration for me. on the sentence level, johnson has some incredible moments. i read a number of passages over and over again kind of marvelling in the choices and structure. but the whole novel left me... disappointed.½

I am not even sure what to say about this book. There were stretches of this book that were brilliant and incisive, and that combined with the breakneck speed of the prose made me hold my breath as I read. Literally, I found myself not breathing as the scenes tumbled forward like cars with defective brakes. And the insight?! Johnson is funny, and clear-eyed, and sees both the South and the ivory tower with equal amounts of disappointment and derision and love. But, Johnson also beats several horses to bloody death; some of the jokes (about academic pretension particularly) go from guffaw-inducing to eye roll-inducing.

Johnson's voice is mostly unique (there is a lot of Junot Diaz in there, but in the end the voice is distinct) and his story is consistently thought-provoking. This is a book people should read, and also one that I think many will enjoy. I absolutely had fun reading this book. I am giving it to my 16 year old (the product of elite private schools and a life lived in Georgia) and can't wait to see what discussion it incites.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

At first I had a hard time understanding why T. Geronimo Johnson's recent second novel, Welcome to Braggsville, ended up as a surprise nominee this year for the prestigious National Book Award; I mean, sure, it's written in this showy language deliberately designed to call attention to itself, which is like catnip to academic award committees, but at its heart it's not much more than a genteel coming-of-age novel, about a nice kid from a small Georgia town who ends up going to college in Berkeley and befriending a group of politically correct nerds, who all humorously decide one day to road-trip to our hero's hometown and stage a protest when they find out that the town still holds a Civil War re-enactment every year. Ah, but then I got about halfway through and realized why it's gotten so much attention -- because their humorous protest goes horribly wrong, sparking a riot among the thousands of proud Southerners in attendance, and in the melee one of the kids doing the protesting (who at the time was being fake-lynched from a tree using a stage harness from the college's theater department) ends up actually getting choked to death, never becoming clear in the chaos whether it was the fault of the rioters or whether the undergraduate protesters simply set up the harness wrong. This turns the entire thing into a Ferguson-style national flashpoint for an angry confrontation about race; and it's this bigger, more sweeping scope that has garnered the book so much attention.

Now, that said, if you don't like novels by MFA holders who want to remind you on every page that they hold an MFA, you need to steer far clear of this particular book -- Johnson has never met a sentence he couldn't double in length and complexity, turning essentially a 150-page Young Adult novel into a 375-page academic darling -- although if you do like such books, there's a lot to love in this one, a novel solidly grounded in concrete character examination but that holds several plot twists to keep things interesting. A book best treated as a genre novel, only the genre being "Books for NPR Fans," your enjoyment of the former will directly relate to your enjoyment of the latter, and this should be kept in mind when deciding whether to pick up a copy yourself.

Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for NPR fans

Although born and raised in New Orleans there is more Ferlinghetti than Faulkner in T. Geronimo Johnson’s satirical novel, Welcome to Braggsville. Warning, this is not a book for readers who are used to being spoon-fed content and answers. There is plenty of content to be had but you will need to find the answers on your own.

The pace and style of the story changes almost by the minute, frenetic as a beat poet one page, measured and reflective the next. Much of it is reminiscent of all-night conversations I had in college, wandering and disjointed in places but oh-so relevant and self-assured. But that stands to reason, seeing as the main characters are students at UC Berkeley. You don’t get any more relevant and self-assured than a Cal student. Trust me on this.

Here’s the story: Four Cal students from various walks of life decide that, for a history class project, they will stage a reenactment. These self-titled ‘four little Indians’ would go to Braggsville, Georgia, a town that annually hosts a Civil War reenactment, and stage their own reenactment of a lynching. Needless to say, things don’t go as expected and their plans go awry faster than you can say ‘media shitstorm’.

To me, this is less a story than a set-up for a discussion in my daughter’s multi-cultural psychology class. Every action by every participant is questioned. Did you think this was a good idea? Do you think it was funny? Are you trying to make us look bad? More than anything, the book is a mirror that reflects the absurdity in all of us. Left-leaning liberal college students fare no better than the white Braggsville residents or the black residents in The Gully.

There is more that I want to say about this book but I think it will best be offered in the context of a discussion. Every reader will form his or her own conclusions and I look forward to finding out if mine sound as whacky to others as they do to me.

FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
• 5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• 4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
• 3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
• 2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
• 1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.½

When D’aron Davenport chooses to leave the small, Dixie-loving town of Braggsville, Georgia for his freshman year at UC Berkeley, he imagines the world will open up before him. Instead, he finds himself thrown into a hyper-sensitive landscape where people jump to answer questions he never thought to ask. D’aron eventually finds solace in a group of friends, dubbed the “4 Little Indians”, who bring him comfort and challenge him in equal measure. But that comfort is shaken when D’aron brings the group to Braggsville to protest its annual Civil War reenactment.

“They all wondered, he knew, especially hearing his Friday-night accent, you—fermented—becoming a long y’all, and ain’t rearing it’s ugly head before, worse yet, being distilled into ‘ant. He could reckon the direction of the wheels turning in their heads: budget cuts plus more out-of-state fart-sniffer students equals lower standards. They were wrong, and if they dared ask, he’d say so. Unlike some of them, he’d done it on his own.”

At the start of the novel, Johnson’s words flow in slam poetry waves that beg to be read aloud. Though he eventually settles into a more traditional narrative voice, the poetic, abstract roots regularly reappear and give Welcome to Braggsville its distinct style; one which may not appeal to all readers. Fortunately, the novel’s merit goes well beyond the order of words on the page to make it a rare blend of style and substance.

Though it sounds like a book aimed squarely at taking down the long history of racism in the South, nothing is safe from Welcome to Braggsville’s biting satire. Political correctness, social media and Berkeley’s outlandish liberalism are mocked and held under a microscope alongside Braggsville’s close-minded residents. Fiercely funny, sad and incredibly timely, Welcome to Braggsville will have readers with solid, long-held beliefs tilting their heads and looking closer.

More at rivercityreading.com

T. Geronimo Johnson has written a modern epic that is "Homeric" in both its scope and theme. Johnson's stunning debut novel boasts a warrior hero named Achilles Conroy who has just returned from the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that has obviously left him scarred emotionally and mentally. His younger brother, Troy (more Homer), fought in the same US Army unit with Achilles, and has returned a decorated 'hero' by virtue of a daring, if foolhardy, rescue of a wounded comrade from a minefield. Achilles was there too, but only to protect his more impulsive sibling. Although equally brave, he received no medals.

The Conroy brothers return to their home in western Maryland just in time for the funeral of their father, killed in an automobile accident. Achilles and Troy are black; their adoptive parents are white. Immediately after the funeral, their mother presents them both with blue envelopes containing information about their birth parents. Achilles refuses to open his, but Troy takes his and disappears. Ever his brother's protector, Achilles goes looking for Troy, beginning a lengthy odyssey which takes him to New Orleans, where he stays with Wages, his former squad leader, and meets Ines, a wealthy, aristocratic woman who ministers to the homeless and drug addicts of the Big Easy. Ines looks white, but Achilles learns she is black, a confusing conundrum for him, since he has been trying to nail down his own racial identity all his life. While looking for Troy, Achilles is duped, beaten and robbed. His search for Troy then takes him to Atlanta just as Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on the Gulf Coast. More dangerous escapades in Atlanta, where he encounters dark drug lords, junkies addicted to and dying from "crunch." He visits morgues and tenements. Ines joins him in Atlanta, but then they must go back to New Orleans, where they see firsthand the awful destruction from the storm, and wade into the mess to try to help the unfortunate poor who were abandoned by the authorities to sink or swim. Like Homer's Odysseus, Johnson's Achilles takes the long way home and in the course of his journey, the reader gets an often disturbing look into the darker side of combat-damaged soldiers. There are several scenes of graphic cruelty, violence and sex that are not for the faint of heart. The fact is, however, such scenes are necessary if one really wants to understand what war does to young men, how it can change them, and permanently damage them.

As far as the military experience is concerned - the camaraderie, the language, the intensity - Johnson has somehow managed to get it right, and I mean dead-center right. There is no mention in the author's bio about military service, so I have to assume the guy has just done his homework. The language, the sexual fantasies and allusions are all there - too authentic and graphic to quote here. But he also tells of the closeness, along with promises they make -

"... the promise to stay in touch, start a Myspace page, have an annual reunion. Achilles knew the desperate promises wouldn't hold ..."

Johnson also knows that having survived the crucible of combat can sometimes make life more precious than anything. When, at a funeral, people speak of going to 'a better place.'

"... no one said it to his face, as if they knew Achilles wasn't buying. Once you were shot at, there was no better place to be than alive."

There is much here about black and white, about racism, about cultural identity and how skin color and its varying hues and darknesses can make a difference. But in the end this is an examination of what it means to be a human being, and how environment, parentage and outside influences (especially violent ones like war, murder and natural disasters) can shape and mold a person, whether it be for good or bad.

If there are any flaws to be found in Johnson's modern version of the Odyssey, it is perhaps that the denouement goes on a bit too long. But I could be wrong in this. Because, considering all that Achilles has been through, the novel's final line is nothing short of perfect: "God, to be alive."½