Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

This won the National Book Award for Fiction this year. There were quite a few really good books on the long list, including one that was my favorite book I read in an overall excellent year of reading, but as the title infers, this is a hell of a book. It is a story without a plot, meandering along with an author who is on a book tour to promote his book, you guessed it, Hell of a Book, when he sees the shadow character in this book, a young black boy he calls "the Kid", someone who is maybe a figment of his imagination, maybe a hallucination, and maybe just the author as a young boy. The Kid has a back story, parents who try to protect him, but he is severely mistreated, called names and bullied because of the color of his skin, who watches his father gunned down by police based solely on the color of his skin, and who feels that being invisible is his safest bet. It is an exploration of racism, a mirror being held up for both the author and the reader to see into. Clever and powerful.