Published: 2024, Knopf Doubleday
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Race, Retellings, Classics, African American
Trigger Warnings: Sexual assault; descriptions of death; references to suicide; strong language, including the use of racial epithets
Audience: Adult
Summary: When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.Percival Everett: America’s Incendiary Man of Letters
Review: While a fan of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I will have to admit up front that I have never read Huckleberry Finn. However, hearing about Percival Everett’s dramatic retelling of the story in the form of James, I knew that I had to read the book this summer. Fortunately, I was not disappointed. James, naturally, follows the perspective of the enslaved Jim as he navigates the land in and around the Mississippi River, on the run after escaping the clutches of slavery. The rest of the book is spent planning how he will free his wife and daughter from enslavement.
Everett’s prose keeps a lot of the humor that one would expect from a Twain story, while also making Jim more three-dimensional as a character. As with most slave narratives, literacy is central to this story. In Everett’s telling of the story, however, all of the enslaved men and women can speak standard English, and only use the pidgin dialect of the enslaved when in the company of their masters. Weaponizing the language of the oppressor was a great element of the story, giving Jim and the rest of the enslaved a sense of agency and respect that is often missing from similar stories.
In all, James was a fun read, although difficult at times due to the expected instances of racism and violence against Black bodies. This is a necessary book that all should read!
