A young white man from the rural South goes to UC Berkeley and is exposed to an alien world. After meeting and befriending three other students, he admits in class that his town holds an annual Civil War reenactment. The four friends decide to attend and make a point. What follows is a combination of satire, social criticism, and a bold discussion of race and place. Narrator MacLeod Andrews captures the essence of the audiobook with a slow delivery full of gravitas. His voice expresses knowing sarcasm and hints at the story’s comic darkness. He does an excellent job performing the many accents; his voice is clear and his tone atmospheric. It’s a great book and a terrific performance. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

10/27/2014
In his second novel, Johnson (Hold It ’Til It Hurts) delivers a funny and tragic coming-of-age story that spares no one its satirical eye. D’aron Little May Davenport, a misfit in his small Georgia town, enrolls at UC Berkeley to get as far away from home as he can. His new roommate, Louis Chang, is an irrepressible fellow completely at home in California, whose fearless determination to be a stand-up comedian offers a “refreshing antidote to the somber, tense mood sweeping campus.” Soon they meet Candice, a pretty white Iowan with hair that “glowed like butter on burned toast,” and Charlie, a black prep school kid, while they are all being scolded for supposed insensitivity at a dorm party. They quickly become close and call themselves the “4 Little Indians.” When D’aron mentions that Braggsville has an annual Civil War reenactment in their American history class, Candice and Louis persuade the group to stage a “performative intervention” over spring break. This is D’aron’s story, told from his perspective, but there’s a secondary voice, an impish interloper, challenging D’aron and the reader to delve deeper, asking again and again, “Por qué?” Johnson’s prose has a sketched-out and dreamlike quality, a private shorthand that adds to the feeling of intimacy, an apt trick when dealing with subject matter like race and class. This ambitious novel stumbles when it departs from its central story, which should be enough: young people clumsily wielding their new tools of critical theory to impress themselves and each other, without fully understanding the effects of their actions. (Feb.)

Inventive, provocative, troubling, hilarious: it’s hard to sum up Welcome to Braggsville in any other way but to add the word “wildly” in front of each of these words.

Brilliant, wildly satirical, and also deeply sobering. The story looms larger than life. At every turn, the impasses Johnson shows us are our own.

Madcap, satirical, sometimes profane and uncanny . . . Welcome to Braggsville is a deeply pleasurable read for the sheer wonder of Johnson’s prose, but a deeply disturbing read for the truth it reveals about us.

DeLilloesque for its orgiastic pop-culture roiling. This is a virtuoso performance by one of our strongest new voices.

Combines the intellectual urgency of a satire with the emotional resonance of a tragedy. Welcome to Braggsville is as smart as it is subversive, and as bleakly hilarious as it is deeply necessary.

One of the most invigorating and least predictable novels of the year.

Combines Ben Fountain’s steely political eye, Junot Diaz’s pop-infused dogma, and Toni Morrison’s sense of social justice through historical reckoning. Big, shiny literary prizes were created for books like this one.

Geronimo Johnson is a fearless and driven young writer of dazzling gifts. His books map American multiculture as a poignant and twisted human comedy in which nobody comes out clean. . . . surprising, heartbreaking, tragicomic, and deeply disturbing.

Southern Gothic meets West Coast political correctness with hilarious results in Johnson’s new satirical novel. . . . An odyssey through Waffle Houses, evangelical churches and backyard barbecue’s ensues, with attitudes about everything from race to social media getting skewered.

Both funny and frightful . . . But as 21st-century American culture crisscrosses with the nation’s history, Johnson’s story evokes more than satirical humor. A sense of conscience and moral purpose takes shape at the heart of the book.

As daring a literary high-wire act as has come along in some time. . . . frequently and unabashedly funny . . . [A] volatile mix of stinging satire, linguistic pyrotechnics and heartbreaking narrative.

Transcendence is what Geronimo Johnson achieves in this remarkable novel. Every racial assumption is both acknowledged and challenged in ways at times hilarious, at other times poignant. Welcome to Braggsville is ambitious, wise, and brave.

Ghastly and funny and gloriously provocative . . . Johnson’s prose is by turns scathing dark humor, soaring lyricism, and a quietly devastating analysis of every species of injustice. The result is a kind of mind-melting poetry—a linguistic electroconvulsive therapy for the reader. This book will wake you up!

Audacious, unpredictable, exuberant and even tragic, in the most classic meaning of the word . . . A heady mix of satire and hyperbole. At times, Welcome to Braggsville reads like a literary hybrid of David Foster Wallace and Colson Whitehead.

The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year. T. Geronimo Johnson plays cultural criticism like it’s acid jazz. His shockingly funny story pricks every nerve of the American body politic. Welcome to Braggsville. It’s about time.

A rollicking satire . . . Radical, hilarious, tragic, and all too relevant.

Audacious, unpredictable, exuberant and even tragic, in the most classic meaning of the word . . . A heady mix of satire and hyperbole. At times, Welcome to Braggsville reads like a literary hybrid of David Foster Wallace and Colson Whitehead.

A riotous tour de force.

12/01/2014
When Braggsville, GA, resident Daron Davenport goes to college in Berkeley, CA, he might as well have gone to another country, so foreign does he feel. However, he's made to feel at home by some students he befriends at a party: Caucasian Candice, who claims Native American blood; Louis, a Malaysian comedian; and Charlie, a gay African American. Inspired by one of their classes, the friends decide to spend their spring break in Daron's hometown, where the annual reenactment of the Civil War will allow them to stage a "performative intervention"—meaning, in this case, a lynching. This scheme has "Bad Idea" written all over it, and the resulting melee reverberates for years to come. VERDICT Johnson's (Hold It 'Til It Hurts) observations about race are both piercing and witty, making this edgy novel so much more complex than a send-up of the South and liberal academe. Johnson is at his best when he's the most straightforward; chapters that take off in stream-of-consciousness Southern dialect unnecessarily confuse the story. But those with a love for linguistic romps will want to take on this literary dark comedy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]—Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA

2014-12-07
Four college students' attempt to protest Southern folkways goes awry in a novel that blurs the line between academic satire and social realism. D'aron, the hero of the second novel by Johnson (Hold It 'Til It Hurts, 2012), was raised in the small Georgia town of Braggsville, where he routinely absorbed homophobic abuse. So when he makes his escape to the University of California, Berkeley, he's gratified by the atmosphere of tolerance. (Even if the definitions of tolerant behavior seem endlessly belabored: At one party, students apply dot stickers to the places on their bodies that are acceptable to touch.) D'aron quickly befriends Louis, an Asian aspiring comedian, Candice, an Iowa-born woman who claims to be part Native American, and Charlie, a black athlete. The quartet's shared interest in social protest inspires them to head to Braggsville, where they plan to interrupt a Civil War re-enactment by staging the whipping and hanging of a slave. The novel's opening third plays much of this as comedy, pitting college kids giddy on leftist jargon against retrograde Dixie, but the plan goes badly awry: Louis (in the role of the slave) winds up dead, and Candice (as slavemaster) is distraught, though what actually happened is deliberately vague. As D'aron falls under scrutiny from the town for concocting the plan, he's forced to contemplate the racist underpinnings of Braggsville society and ponder what use his education is (or isn't) when confronting it. Johnson is supremely savvy at capturing the students' ideological earnestness, finding the humor in academic jargon (a faux glossary is included), and exploring the tense divides between blacks and whites in the South. And though the reader might occasionally feel whipsawed by Johnson's shifts in tone from comedy to tragedy, the swerving seems appropriate to the complexity of its theme. A rambunctious, irreverent yet still serious study of the long reach of American institutional racism.