Join us for a discussion of American novelist and poet Jason Mott's newest title. Book copies are available across from the first-floor circulation desk for a month-long checkout. The book is also available through OverDrive as an ebook (click here to access) or as an audiobook (click here to access).  

Library programs are open and beneficial to all. We invite people with physical and/or cognitive disabilities to attend any of our activities and will strive to support individual needs. If you need accommodations to participate, please contact one of our Inclusion Coordinators, Matt Krueger and/or Amy Holland, one week prior to the program.

Registration is required and new members are always welcome! This program will be held online using a communication app/website called Zoom. Register with an email address and you will receive an email with the log-in information for Zoom.

Book description: 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 more urgent: 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 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.