Saturday Review: “A Voice Out Here in the Chaos,” a review by Barbara Bennett of Jason Mott’s People Like Us (2025) in NCLR Online Spring 2026
Barbara Bennett, a storied reviewer amongst those that find themselves published in NCLR’s pages, tackles a mind-bending, time traveling tale concerning the experience of being Black, People Like Us. She writes, “If you read Jason Mott’s National Book Award-winning book, Hell of a Book and wondered just what happens to those characters after the end, you’ll be happy to hear that he’s continued their escapades in his latest novel, People Like Us.”
The novel, just as out there, introspective, and poignantly topical as Mott’s previous work, follows the same unnamed narrator, now well-known author Soot, and The Kid, or Dylan as he is now known, as the narrator finds himself whisked out of the gun-strewn streets of the USA and into the relatively safer cobblestone steps of Europe. Here, both the narrator and Soot must come to grips with how they really feel about those deadly weapons they left back in America, with Bennett writing that, “One puzzling thing (of many) is that both of the characters in this book – although having experienced gun violence in their own lives – come to the same conclusion: ‘Maybe I should get a gun.’”
Bennett lays it all out at the end of her review, writing that, “Unfortunately, guns are here to stay in America for the foreseeable future. Racism is here, and violence is here as well. We can work to fix that, but mostly Jason Mott is telling us that, in the meantime, we have to hold onto our imaginations,” and that, “This is what will sustain us.”
Read the entire review here and buy a copy of People Like Us from Bookshop.org.
