Point of View

Hell of a Book is written from both the third and first person points of view. Each section of the novel alternates between these two narrative vantages. Every other section of the novel is written from the third person perspective. This third person narrator traces the story of a young Black boy, nicknamed Soot by bullies at school. Alternating sections present an unnamed first person narrator's perspective, and detail the narrator's book tour across America.

In the first half of the novel, Soot's and the first person narrator's lives bear little resemblance one to another. However, as the novel unfolds, the reader discovers an increasing number of similarities between the two characters' once-disparate lives. For example, in the opening third person section, the narrator says that Soot lived in a "small country house at the end of the dirt road beneath the blue Carolina sky...