Mr. Mott has written a book that is full of contradictions: it’s both funny and tragic, hopeful and depressing, truthful and filled with fantasy. It is, most certainly, a novel to be remembered and reread. It is also impossible for me to sum up in a few words or sentences. His way of weaving together the truths of American life, our gun culture, our history and where we are likely headed make for both somber and entertaining reading. This is a must read book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dutton Books for the ARC to read and review.

I felt the same way after reading this book as I did after reading Hell of a Book- devastated, hollowed out, introspective and unknowing. Oddly enough - all of those things in a way that made me grateful to have been able to read a book with such a unique story sequence that ends with lines so heartbreakingly beautiful and sad yet hopeful that you need to read them over and over to really absorb them.
I did struggle with parts of this book- most notably the parts about Remus and teeth obsession- but I am also pretty sure I just am not wise enough to understand some of the more obscure messaging of the book. But certainly as the story narrows and the tone changes, the overall message and perspective are crystal clear and again, heartbreakingly so.
I am not sure- and Mott aims it this way- which parts are based on his life and which are not. I can’t wait to read reviews and interviews when this book is released in August to see if any of that gets revealed by Mott or if (as I am expecting) he stays intentionally vague about the details.
Buy this book and then take the time you need to savor it. It’s not an easy read, but it’s more than worth the effort.
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for the free advance e-book.

Jason Mott delivers another powerful, thought provoking story that stays with you long after the last page. People Like Us is beautifully written, timely, and emotionally resonant. Mott masterfully blends social commentary with raw, human storytelling. A must-read.

Was a unique reading experience about finding belonging in an unsettling, unfit world, and hovers somewhere between fact and fiction.

There were elements that reminded me of Percival Everett, an over the top storyline with a whole mix of lovable characters, even the fascination of Nicolas Cage (I enjoyed!). Then there were nods to James Baldwin in journeying in Europe and trying to find one's home abroad.

I enjoyed this

Soot returns! You don’t have to have already met him in Jason Mott’s National Book Award-winning hilarious and brilliant Hell of a Book as a prequel to meeting the writer protagonist Soot as an adult in People Like Us. But I did, and even though I’m hazy on details (I read Hell of a Book a hella long time ago in November 2021), references in People Like Us brought it back and made me laugh as if I were reliving a real-life memory—which has special meaning in a book where that kind of experience is key. (Okay, no spoilers.)

So the new book:

Hilarious and on my god, the construction: how it organically grows even as it switches personas, locales, dropping into the middle of scenes. I never lost track of where I was and what was happening. It was seamless, jumping around in time, changing persons (here, I mean first to third and back again), because just soon enough, a phrase or a sentence is dropped in with such finesse you might not notice, and it orients you.

The writing is poetic without straining to be poetry. Hilarious out of honest unpredictability. Since there are two main persona protagonists, there are two slightly different voices. (You will have to read it to understand this better.) One blends a kind of wise-guy sound of 1940s movies (everybody has nicknames that apply to some characteristic—like Frenchie or The Goon or Kid—and money is “dough” and the reader is “sister”) with this poetry and present-day experience of being a Black man who, no matter what his accomplishments and education, is still stopped on the highway for DWB (driving while Black). And the other? Well, the same, less the wise guy. The overall voice (the compilation of the two) is delight and fun and radiant energy in words. I’d give a glorious sample, but the publisher is not allowing quotes until the book launches August 5th.

The story of a National Book Award-winning writer on a book tour, at home in his past, and everywhere the story goes is told in alternating timelines which readers of Hell of a Book might remember is due to the protagonist writer’s “condition” whereby he time travels. This is helped by an ingenious book design using little silhouette illustrations of the protagonist in two different forms ... with a slight revision for the final chapter.

Some Thoughts on Time Travel
Both Hell of a Book and this new book hit me straight in the heart, bypassing my brain. And I think one of the reasons for that is that any reader who’s lived enough to have a substantial inner book of history—of place, of deaths, of whatever—has the same “condition” that Soot and, I wager, Jason Mott have: the experience of time traveling. You see something, smell something, hear something, and <i>boom! Fade out. Fade in</i> on a scene from your past. It can be so visceral that it feels like time travel … and for all I know, it is if you think your real self is Consciousness rather than a material body. I love what Mott does with this in these two books. Everything is right there all the time. It never goes away.

Okay, back to the plot
I’m not going to give the plot for two reasons: I don’t like summarizing plots and I think it’s the writer’s job and the reader’s pleasure to experience plot. All I’ll say is that while on the book tour, Soot or someone who doesn’t mind being mistaken for every living famous Black writer (the cover copy identifies them as two people, but things are not so clear) go to Minneapolis and to Italy and other parts of “Euroland” where the language is “Foreign.” And they slip around in time back to their original home in the South. There is a compelling drama and deeply painful emotional stuff revealed with such artistry that I could never get enough in the first book, and, hence, I’m glad for a sequel. The rest is for you to enjoy as it unfolds—or more accurately, jump-cuts.

Jason Mott is a skilled technician, hilarious, and as free in writing, and in a way, dramatizing the very act of writing, as I’m sure he and a lot of us aspire to be in real life. The work sizzles with unmediated life.

This book is like nothing I've read before--and I mean that in a good way. I was never really sure what was real and what was imaginary, and isn't that the way the world (and especially American) feels in 2025--like some kind of weird twilight zone where we keep asking, "Is this really happening?" Jason Mott somehow managed to cover difficult topics like gun-violence and suicide with humor and compassion.

This isn't an easy book to read, in terms of the subject matter. But I think it's one of those books that's hard but necessary. The combination of humor and heartbreak, beautifully written into one story, makes this a book I won't soon forget. 4.5 stars!

I recommend reading Hell of a Book by Mott before this one. You don’t have to, but this one will make a bit more sense if you do.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the ARC.

Hell of a Book was the best book I read in 2024. People Like Us is the best book I’ve read (so far) in 2025. Mott is an amazing writer and story teller. I have no criticism whatsoever for this book. Everyone I know will soon be tired of hearing me talk about it.

Jason Mott’s People Like Us is a genre-blurring, heart-punch of a novel that weaves magical realism with raw emotional truth. In a world haunted by gun violence and grief, two Black writers navigate fame, trauma, and memory through parallel journeys that collide with surprising tenderness. With sea monsters, time travel, and trophy-drinking mischief, Mott balances biting satire with aching humanity. It’s as surreal as it is sincere—wickedly funny one moment, gut-wrenching the next. A luminous, unclassifiable novel that lingers long after the final page, People Like Us is a love letter to storytelling, survival, and the resilience of people like us.

People Like Us is a powerful and emotional novel about two Black writers trying to find peace in a world filled with pain and violence. One is traveling the world after winning a major book award, while the other prepares to speak at a school where a shooting happened. The story moves between real and dreamlike moments, showing how hard it is to stay grounded when your life has been turned upside down.

The book talks about deep topics like grief, gun violence, and losing a loved one to suicide. There are also moments of beauty, especially in scenes set in Paris, and reflections on what it’s like to be a Black writer in different parts of the world. Jason Mott mixes heartbreak with humor, and the result is a story that will stay with you long after you finish it.

I hope I didn’t do myself a disservice by not reading Mott’s Hell of a Book first. I was unaware that People Like us is its quasi-sequel, but it reads just fine as a standalone. I did read up on Hell of a Book (spoilers and all!) for context, and after reading People, I will be reading Hell. How to describe it! A witty, introspective, reality-bending meta tale about an author with a National Book Award by an author with a National Book Award. Autobiographical? Perhaps, but don’t try to guess what’s real. Jumping between two narratives, we get two perspectives of the violence and beauty in the world. We travel back and forth between Europe with its clean-air countryside optimism and our beloved, murky America so heavy with memories, both sad and sweet. Mott’s characters navigate this dreamscape-slash-hellscape, considering the future while guardedly time-traveling through the past. People Like Us is a story about being Black in America and abroad. It’s also a story about guns in America and our intimate relationship with their violence. The emotional highs and lows of this novel made it a compelling and fast read for me.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Prepare to cry.

Jason Mott follow’s up his previous book with another compelling, creative, and original novel. I cannot recommend this one highly enough.

The book starts with a disclaimer from the author that the book is fiction and while it’s based on actual events in the author’s life, he’ll deny it if he’s ever challenged. The book defies description so good luck figuring out what parts are real.
“They want to know how much of what they were told is real and how much is imagined - which is a way of saying they want to know how much of the world in the book is the world in which they live because, if they can know that, they can understand the things they see on the news each day a little better.”
Mott is not a big believer in the need for a plot. The book sort of flows, almost poetic at times. At times, it has a hallucinogenic feel to it. The book begins when the winner of the National Book Award or “The Big One” as he calls it, is confronted in an alley by a man who announces his intent to kill him. So, when his agent tells him there’s a French billionaire who wants to bring him over to Europe, he readily agrees. Meanwhile, another author arrives at a Minnesota college campus on the heels of a shooting tragedy.
The writing is flat out amazing. Mott riffs on words, especially the title, the way a musician riffs on a refrain. And there are all the emotions. There’s an abundance of humor. But there’s also an abundance of sadness. And fear. Guns and violence are themes in both storylines. As is belonging and the question of where is home. Given what’s happening in the US right now, it’s a very timely book. In fact, in the Acknowledgments, Mott says the book was made possible because of a grant from the Endowment for the Arts and I wonder if there will ever be another grant.
My thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books for an advance copy of this book.

“Cynicism is the refuge of a world-weary heart.”

Jason Mott’s People Like Us is a genre-defying marvel—at once deeply personal, wildly imaginative, and profoundly resonant. By blending elements of speculative fiction with biting social commentary and aching emotional truth, Mott crafts a novel that is equal parts satire, elegy, and love letter to the power of storytelling.

The dual narratives of two Black writers—one riding the surreal wave of literary fame, the other grappling with grief and responsibility in the aftermath of a school shooting—form the backbone of a story that is both wickedly funny and devastatingly honest. Mott doesn’t shy away from the chaos of modern life: gun violence, systemic racism, public trauma. Yet he delivers these themes through a lens that includes dreamlike encounters, time travel, sea monsters, and the absurdity of sipping booze from a book award trophy.

Every page crackles with wit and insight. The surreal moments don’t distract—they deepen the emotional truth of the story. Mott’s characters love, ache, grieve, and persist in ways that are painfully familiar yet wholly original. This novel is both a howl of protest and a song of survival.

People Like Us is a literary tightrope walk—hilarious and harrowing, surreal yet grounded. It’s an unforgettable reminder that in a world on fire, the act of telling a story, being seen, and being heard, is its own kind of revolution.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Two black authors - one on a European tour having won the national book award-the other in the bitter cold of a Minnesota winter to address a school that has just suffered a mass shooting.
At times funny and very sad, filled with dream-like sequences, and also with what I feel must be real events from the author’s life. In my opinion it offers a very prescient look at what America has become through the looking glass of tragic events that have or will happen. I did not find it an easy read but certainly a very good one.

I received a copy for review. All opinions are my own. I am still trying to catch my breath after this one but all I can say is this was truly an enjoyable read. It’s insanely relatable for me and I found myself humored at times and shocked and saddened at other times. The flow of the book made it really easy to read and keep up with. Very powerful storytelling by the author is what really kept my attention. I fell in love with these characters and it was as if I knew them in real life!

This clever, fascinating novel is about guns and violence through the eyes of two likeable characters who are writers that, for different reasons, are struggling with crime. The cadence of the dialogue engages the reader as the writers' stories unfold through alternating chapters. Although the topic is somber, author Jason Mott's approach makes this novel an excellent choice for discussion groups.

Jason Mott's *People Like Us* is a genre-blending narrative that weaves elements of magical realism into a poignant exploration of grief and identity. Following two Black writers—one embarking on a global book tour and the other preparing to speak at a school affected by a shooting—the novel delves into themes of loss, memory, and the surreal intersections of reality and imagination. With its blend of humor and sorrow, the story offers a profound reflection on the human experience, leaving readers both moved and contemplative.

People Like Us by Jason Mott is a poignant novel that explores themes of identity, grief, and human connection. The story follows Gene, who, after the death of his brother, discovers a mysterious truth: there are people who look exactly like him, but aren't him. This revelation forces him to confront profound questions about who we are and how we relate to others.

The novel examines grief and loss through Gene's emotional journey, while also delving into the nature of identity and self-perception. Mott uses speculative fiction to explore how we are all interconnected, even through our differences.

The writing is evocative and poetic, and the characters, particularly Gene, are well-developed and relatable. Overall, People Like Us is a moving, introspective novel that resonates deeply on emotional and philosophical levels.

A book that had my emotions all over the place. It takes a lot for a story to do that to me. This writer nailed it! The relationships and plot are excellent and inventive. I found it a pleasurable experience to get lost in. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.