Review by Booklist Review
Mott's self-conscious, deliberate, and determined fifth novel embodies one of its closing lines: "[a] story with just enough lies to make sense of the truth." Mott (Hell of a Book, 2021) returns to exploring Black authorship against the backdrop of America's gun violence and racial tensions, here extending these discussions across the Atlantic. Two main contexts emerge: the fanfare of touring as an acclaimed author, and the weight of speaking to students in a country struggling with school shootings. Through witty one-liners, sharp observations, and bold humor, People like Us innovatively carves a space on the shelf of hard-to-define books: it contains elements of memoir, comedy, satire, social commentary, narrative fiction, and sentimental literature. At times, it even feels whimsical, both in the entertaining, playful adventuring to new places and in the affective, dewy-eyed hope for a better world. A dynamic text moving faster than the pages turn, this is a novel true to our time's search for a path forward--one that even dares to dream of togetherness.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hell of a Book won the National Book Award; readers will be interested to see Mott's literary exploration of weighty contemporary concerns.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The scathing latest from Mott (Hell of a Book) follows two Black writers from North Carolina as they grapple with the violence of American society and the mixed blessings of success. Soot, whose story is told in the third person, is invited to speak at a college in Minnesota that was recently the site of a mass shooting ("It's all going to be okay, now that you're here," says the school representative who picks him up from the airport). In his writing and public appearances, he's known to "speak to grief," having lost his daughter Mia to suicide when she was 16. Mott alternates the story of Soot's college visit with that of a writer who bears similarities to Mott (his name is revealed near the end) and who buys a Colt .45 (a gun he chooses because it's "as American as apple pie") to protect himself after receiving death threats. When he's offered a Faustian bargain from a French billionaire--patronage for life, on the condition that he never return to the U.S.--he bitterly accepts and moves to Paris ("For the right price, leaving America just might be the new American Dream," he reflects). There, the novel's mischievous humor gradually gives way to a frightening fever dream. Mott's satire is thoroughly uncompromising, which makes it all the more refreshing. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Impudent humor, dark farce, and the looming threat of violence somehow merge in jittery tandem in this novel, along with a pair of storylines about Black writers on book tours--and in personal upheaval. On the one hand, there's Soot, a Black writer who is "the age of early evening bedtimes and early morning ibuprofen." (In other words, 44 years old.) He's visiting Minnesota in the dead of winter, away from home to promote his new book, and one senses from the start that it isn't just the snowy, frigid air that's making him shudder. On the other hand, there's a younger, friskier National Book Award--winning Black writer, also on a literary tour, in the more temperate climes of southern Europe. Neither the latter's age nor name are specified here. But he's perfectly OK with people who mistake him for Ta-Nehisi Coates or Colson Whitehead or even Walter Mosley. ("Turns out I can be anybody you want me to be if I'm just willing to say the words.") These mercurial men are the dual (if not dueling) protagonists in this latest from Mott, a follow-up of sorts to his 2021 National Book Award--winning novel,Hell of a Book, in which Soot appeared in younger form, growing up in North Carolina. Soot spends most of his narrative here bouncing back in time to when he was still happily married, and his daughter was still alive. Inferences of the tragic calamity that took Soot's daughter's life intrude on the public and private moments of his tour. Meanwhile, the other author is having a time of it overseas as he's embraced by a rich and famous Frenchman who offers him lasting wealth if he never returns to the U.S. As this transaction plays out, the author meets an enigmatic young man named Dylan who hates it when the author calls him "Kid" (and who also seems a carryover from Mott's previous book) along with an effusive Black giant who loves H.P. Lovecraft and speaks with a Scottish brogue. The younger author is also being marked for death by a madman named Remus--the latter development compelling the author to secure a firearm. Indeed, guns are the subtext that link both narratives, along with the trauma they instill in those who witness and survive their malign use. The whole book seems the literary equivalent of a post-bop jazz performance, with oblique happenings that compel attention because of the book's antic energy and lyrical passages. A meta-novel that stings and touches the reader. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
