Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - Hell of a Book

Reviews tagging 'Alcohol'

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

12 reviews

kaakison's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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bookgardendc's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The title does the book justice. I’ve never read anything quite like this - it’s funny and complex and deeply profound and yet somehow two-thirds of the book manages to
feel fairly light. I clearly felt the inner struggles of the characters, and the generational trauma that African Americans must experience. Beautiful book.

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heatherilene's review against another edition

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emotional funny mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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hannah2186's review against another edition

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dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

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thelittle_seokmin's review against another edition

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informative inspiring mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

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just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

After a bit of a break reading other stuff, I'm back with a review for my 8th Aspen Words Literary Prize 2022 Longlist read. This one also happened to have won this year's National Book Award, so I was heading into it prepared for some intense literary fiction and some high expectations. Plus, it was set in North Carolina, so I figured that close-to-home setting might cause it to be particularly moving for me. (I tried to temper those expectations down a bit, to be fair, but y'all know that's hard to do.)

I feel like I'm going to write this little plot blurb, only to turn around and tell you in the review that this is not really an accurate feel for the book, but here we go anyway. This is a dual-perspective novel. The first POV we get is that of an unnamed author on a book tour across the country promoting his recent best-selling novel. He's dealing with quite a few personal demons, including alcoholism, lack of meaning/direction in life, and mental health struggles that cause him to lose touch with reality based on, as becomes clearer over time, some past trauma/loss. The second POV we get is that of Soot, a young Black boy from somewhere rural in America, and his daily experiences as a Black boy in school, with family, and in a greater community context. Then there's The Kid, an amalgamation of Soot and the unnamed author's past self and all the other young Black boys in America, that starts "visiting" the author during his travels. And as the novel reaches its culmination, the pasts and fates of these characters meld together in a way that holds deep messages about the reality of being a Black man in America.

So those are the "facts" of the plot and characters. But really, as promised, that really doesn't capture the happenings or uniquities of this novel at all. Let me start with the writing, because that was a centerpiece of this novel, for me. This was some of the most unique structuring and story-telling (in the most literal “telling of a story” sense) that I have ever read. From the start, there was a clear building to a convergence of past and present, reality and imaginary, so that even though I felt a bit lost for the first large chunk of the book, plot-wise, that build kept me moving forwards and on the edge of my seat with anticipation. As a personal preference, I don't usually read things that lean into satire (I haven't liked the genre since my 9th grade English teacher made us read Animal Farm), and this novel does strongly lean into the ridiculous and absurd and extreme. That being said, I recognize the quality of it here, the intelligence in the satire, and also deeply respect that, sometimes it's the only way to truly address and call out a reality that is so unreal as to be satirical itself. I know that's the genius of the genre. So, while it set this book up to not be a new favorite for me, the hardcore way that the line of real and imaginary is played with here, the delicacy of the line between the acerbic and the sincere, the urgency of tone, is a a literary masterstroke that showcases how close reality actually is to the unreal.

And now, the plot, to the best of my ability. For starters, the fact that some things are real, some are imagined, and even in the cases of "real" things, there is jumping in time between sections of narration, this is one of those books that you just have to give up the reins on and let it drag you along, assuming that things clear up (more or less) eventually. And they do, mostly...enough to make me feel like I had mostly "understood" it by the time I finished. So, I'll take it. I will say though, that overall things felt uneven. That urgency I mentioned earlier was strong in the beginning and end, but there was a whole section in the middle (the part that had a cameo from Nic Cage), where things slowed and I got a little lost. Maybe it was a reference I didn't understand, and then it would be on me, but I felt like, while so many of the other chapters were shot after shot to the heart, that part felt comparatively distant/confused. I did love the way the various narratives did finally converge, in most ways expected, but with some unexpected aspects - my anticipation felt fulfilled.

Along with the writing, the themes and topical foci were the other highlights of this novel. Mott really delves into, without flinching or compromising, being Black, specifically a Black man, in America. He paints such a visceral picture of the way Black kids in America cannot be kids, lose their innocence so early, what they must do to survive, because of the way America sees them (and, particularly, in context of police brutality). He connects this heartbreakingly then to how that breaks parents in turn, because of what they must teach/say/do to help their children survive. Mott then attacks the other side of that perspective, towards the end, when our narrator has a (possibly imaginary) conversation with a cop that murdered a Black child. And just wow, the way that in such short order he is able to capture and demonstrate (if the reader is willing to really comprehend) the essence of the contradictory expectations, and complete lack of cognitive dissonance in white Americans, is...phew. Mott also crushes it with the metaphors (or at least, I read them as metaphors). The invisibility of The Kid as a representation of the invisibility of Black people in the US and the narrator's “condition” as a representation of mental health issues related to/coping mechanisms for trauma were particularly strong ones. And finally, Mott's focus on the idea that disappearing seems like the only way to escape the obsessive fear and anger that come as part of the Black community, when learning to love yourself as a Black person seems impossible, when all signs/education point to a past and future of trauma, and any evidence of other realities and options are buried deep - it's a heavy reality to witness, to say nothing of the living of it.

I'm not really sure how to close this review, in the same way that I was struggling to write it altogether. This novel was unlike anything I have ever read before, in all its intensity and farce. It's emotional, but the style keeps the writer at a distance in some ways. It's unyielding in its condemnation and yet its satirical nature forces the reader to have to want to accept that condemnation in order to make it effective. It's heartbreaking and ridiculous and I cannot figure out how to respond to that combination. But also, it's forcing the issue, these realities that must be grappled with, just by existing and naming them. And the absolutely original way it does that is cause for respect; I see why it's gotten the critical acclaim that it has.

“Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that's what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we've invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. SO maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.”

“But the words we say never seem to live up to the ones inside our head.”

“'You’re supposed to say something. You're supposed to speak about the Black condition! You're supposed to have a voice!' / 'A voice? What voice? The voice of my people? Always? Every second of every day of my life? That's what Black people are always supposed to do? And the Black condition? What kind of condition is that? You mean as in an existing state of being? Or a condition as in a state of health - like an illness?'”

“You will forget him. [...] This boy is only the first of many that you will meet over your life. They will stack upon one another, week by week. You'll try to keep them in your head but, eventually, you'll become too full and they'll spill out and be left behind. And then, one day, you'll grow older and you'll realize that you've forgotten his name - the name of the first dead Black boy that you promised yourself you wouldn't forget - and you'll hate yourself. You'll hate your memory. You'll hate the world. You'll hate the way you've failed to stop the flow of dead bodies that have piled up in your mind. You'll try to fix it, and fail, and you'll drown in rage. You'll turn on yourself for not fixing everything and you'll drown in sadness. And you'll do it over, and over, and over again for years and, one day, you'll have a son and you'll see him staring down the same road that you've been on and you'll want to say something that fixes him, something that saves him from it all...and you won't know what to say.”

“It’s the soundtrack of America right now. The jam we all bump and grind to. People being shot is the way we mark the passage of time now.”

“…that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to care about everyone. So you pick your battles. You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It's a type of emotional triage.”

“But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something will kill you and being able to choose not to do it.”

“Even with figments of your imagination, it's best to be as honest and forthcoming as possible.”

“If nobody can see me [...] then what difference does it make what I do? Especially if I'm only hurting myself." / "Just because somebody can't see you doesn't mean you're allowed to do something like that. […] Because you have to believe you matter, whether someone else sees you or not.”

“It’s amazing how much you can get used to the intolerable, right up until the moment when you realize you have to pass it on to some pair of bright eyes that have no choice but to be dimmed by it.”

“The irony is enough to fill me up to the gills and beyond. So my stomach does all it can: it vomits up all of the chocolate, all the Twizzlers, all the lynched dreams, the redlined hopes, the colorblind promises that got Stopped-and-Frisked, the brutal, melanin-driven epigenetically inherited Americana that nodoby - not even me - wants to talk about...it all comes erupting out of me faster than the red glare of those famous rockets bursting in air.”

"No. I'm not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There's just too much of a backstory of sadness that's always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, they're just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself."

"She still cared enough to show love to her son, but the way she showed her love was hardened."

"But the talk of anger and frustration is careful to avoid the conversation having to do with sadness. Because, ultimately, it's sadness that sits at the bedrock of all the anger these people feel every day. Sadness at being left behind and left out of so much of what everyone else seems to have in this country, in this world."

“You know how it is. It...it just gets too big. All of it. Stacks up every fucking day and none of us can make a dent in it, so we just sorta move through it without ever letting it get its hooks in. It's survival. It's how you stay sane. It's how you stay alive. And there ain't no way to change that.”

“But, in the end, as it is with all of us, he could not be protected from the world.”

“We want the great history we see in others. And all we're ever given is the story of being in pain and being forced to overcome.”

Content Warnings

purplepenning's review against another edition

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challenging emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Content Warnings

amerikanerin's review against another edition

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I'm a quarter of the way in and this drunk author is wandering around getting smacked repeatedly by a driver, I will not waste my time reading further. The first quarter is not well written in my opinion.

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deenice2819's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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maryannc's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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