National Bestseller From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of Hold It ’Til It Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil ...

Welcome to Braggsville is a deliberately uncomfortable book, and on that count, we would say that T. Geronimo Johnson accomplished exactly what he intended to. The core incident, in which four college students create a racially charged performance art piece that accidentally ends in death, allows Johnson to push against stereotypes and expose racial tensions well, and it leaves the reader feeling pretty icky the entire way. The four college students are good characters with complex and not altogether sympathetic reasons for pulling the prank, and it gives Johnson license to do winning and scathing send-ups of artist privilege, adopting other's trauma, and the tension between perceptions and reality of racism, activism, and acceptance. Also, he's very good in his treatment of the townspeople and especially the sheriff, not collapsing them into a stereotype of southern races, but also not excising all the real racism from that culture. He does a good job of making the incident just as uncomfortable to all of the Southerners as he does to the college students. All of these components of the book were strong, and Johnson captures the right tone that some elements can come off as funny in a dark way even amidst a lot of pain. However, to get the story to go where he wants it to, Johnson has to pull some plot twists that no one in NUBClub was fully on board for. The rape accusations, the FBI interventions, and particularly the wrap up of the reunions of the three characters at the end didn't flow naturally with the rest of the book. The book moves in sudden turns, and we found many of those jarring enough that we couldn't outright love the novel. Overall, we think Johnson pulls us his intention here. He wants to look race through a satirical and uncomfortably complex lens, and on that front, he succeeds. But the plot he constructions feels very much a vehicle to do this, and it doesn't flow as a story as well as it could. The Sellout is a good novel to contrast with this, and one that we feel is superior. Johnson's book is worth the read, but just don't be surprised when the story forces itself somewhere that it doesn't really belong.