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 War reenactment—a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer. Welcome to Braggsville. The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia. Population 712 Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D’aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond. Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until one disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends: Louis, a “kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen from Chicago. They dub themselves the “4 Little Indians.” But everything changes in the group’s alternative history class, when D’aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, recently rebranded “Patriot Days.” His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires Candice to suggest a “performative intervention” to protest the reenactment. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the 4 Little Indians descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences. With the keen wit of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the deft argot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, T. Geronimo Johnson has written an astonishing, razor-sharp satire. Using a panoply of styles and tones, from tragicomic to Southern Gothic, he skewers issues of class, race, intellectual and political chauvinism, Obamaism, social media, and much more. A literary coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with tremendous social insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible portrait of contemporary America.

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.