#FridayReads: Hell of a Book

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists it truly becomes its title.

Have you read this yet? Reading this right now? Share this image with the hashtag #FridayReads to spread the love!

Share
Tweet
Share
Share
Pin it
Share

Category: #FridayReads

Tagged with:#FridayReads, celebrity book clubs

768 views

#FridayReads: Portrait Of A Thief

April 7, 2022April 7, 2022 Written by Rachel Mann

Click to Read an Excerpt on First Look. Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook. Read An Author Letter from Grace D. Li. View or Download the Book Club Kit Here. History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art […]

#Fridayreads: Sunflower Sisters

April 8, 2021April 8, 2021 Written by Rachel Mann

Click to Read an Excerpt on First Look. Georgeanna “Georgey” Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she […]

#FridayReads: TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW

July 7, 2022July 8, 2022 Written by Rachel Mann

Click to Read an Excerpt on First Look. Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook. Watch Gabrielle Zevin on our Fiction of Connection Panel. On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie […]

#FridayReads: My Sweet Girl

September 23, 2021September 23, 2021 Written by Rachel Mann

Click to Read an Excerpt on First Look. View or Download the Book Club Kit on ISSUU. Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook. Ever since she was adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage, Paloma has had the best of everything—schools, money, and parents so perfect that she fears she’ll never live up to them. […]

#FridayReads: Hell of a Book

Join the discussion Cancel reply