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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
adventurous
dark
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
this was a very faced paced, suspenseful and moving novel. i don’t think it was intended to be one thing in particular and takes many lives despite being very short & digestible. at times humorous, introspective, even bordering on fantastical, but consistently less about slavery and more about the personhood of enslaved people. i connected with it the most when i felt able to do my own deductions and analysis rather than be told things outright, so the more surreal or ‘read between the lines’ moments were a highlight. i haven’t read huckleberry finn which i’m sure impacts my experience with this book a lot but i really “enjoyed” my time with it (if you can say that about feeling confronted with horrors).
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
An easy read & a hard read all at once. The writing was easy to read, but the story was heavy. Jim's perspective as he navigated without Huck was inspiring and terrifying all at once. The code switching was brilliant. I wanted more at the end though. It ended unexpectedly. He had been running for his life the entire book and it was one more runaway with his family, but without a conclusion this time. Is this the authors way of telling the reader that the running never ends? Possibly.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
James by Percival Everett is a re-telling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved man. Much of the narrative is true to the source material, including Huck faking his own death and traveling downriver with Jim and joining up with two con-men. However, as Jim and Huck’s narratives are split, we see into a side of fiction storytelling that we were never intended to see.
Retellings are notoriously difficult to do, and do well, and this really hit all the marks for me. I can absolutely see why it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. Although Goodreads listed this as a “ferociously funny” book, I didn’t quite see it, but that doesn’t make this book any less of an important and spectacular read. There were a few lighter parts, but overall the book was much more serious and thought-provoking than the preview would have you believe. Overall, I thought Everett brought the right tone to this novel, and I really appreciated throughout the book how Jim used a slave vernacular as a sort of performance. This felt really deliberate for a retelling of “Huckleberry Finn”, as writing in vernacular English was not as popular when it was originally published.
“…my performance for the boys became a frame for my story. My story became less of a tale as the real game became the display for the boys…”
“I’m going back to sleep,” the boy said. “Just one thing?” “Yeah, Huck?” “I understand why you talk the way you do.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I mean it makes sense.” I studied his face. He was talking with his eyes closed, as much fighting sleep as losing to it. There was a lot of this in that face. “You be a smart boy, Huck.”
“I paused, unsure of my diction, whether to speak as myself or as a slave. I made the safe choice. “I is, suh.”
“He sat. “Why are you talking like that?” “I’m pointing a pistol at you and asking about the whereabouts of my family and you’re concerned with my speech? What is wrong with you?”
Also, the sheer amount of racism and dehumanization that was displayed in this book, really felt timely for the source material and teh controversy of using the n-word throughout.
“I had stood and listened to this transaction and never once was I asked for either opinion or desire. I was the horse that I was, just an animal, just property, nothing but a thing, but apparently I was a horse, a thing, that could sing.”
“A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking.”
Some folks have slaves. Who else gonna do the work? I have no slaves. I don’t have a dog, neither.”
“You’re mortgaged, Jim. Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you. Miss Watson gets a bond, a piece of paper that say what you’re worth, and you just keep living in this condition. Living. You’re a part of the bank’s assets and so people all over the world are making money off your scarred black hide. Make sense? Nobody wants you free.”
I also really liked this quote, with Huck, as it shows his ignorance in the beginning of the book:
“So truth is I’m stealin’ you from her.” “Well, Huck, now you din’t zackly take me from her, did you? We sort of come dis way tagether.” “But I didn’t give you back to her, did I?” “No, you din’t.” “So that’s like stealin’, right? If’n I took a mule from teh side of the road and I knowed who it belonged to, wouldn’t that be stealin’?” “I ain’t a mule, Huck.”
Towards the end of the book, Huck starts realizing that slavery is wrong, and he says he will fight for the Union as that’s the side against slavery. A really interesting point of growth for him, in my opinion, that seemed to also be topical for ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, but was previously only solely told through a white lens.
Along the way, we also see Jim grappling with his identity, finding new and raw emotions that he felt like he couldn’t afford to have before.
“I found a new emotion as we trudged. A couple of new emotions. The woman’s father had touched my hair. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anxiety, but at that moment, I had felt anxiety. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger towards a white man, but I had felt anger. The anger was a good bad feeling.”
“My anger facinated me, still. I twas certainly not a new emotion, but the range, the scope, the direction of it, was entirely novel and unfamiliar.”
And over time, we also see him come to terms with who he is. And who Huck is to him. At the beginning of the book, he calls himself Jim. “I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.” Towards the end, he tells someone he is “just James”.
Overall, this was incredible. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time, as there’s several things in here that will just stick with you. I could not really put this book down, and found myself picking it up frequently when I couldn’t sleep at 2am. The retelling through a slave’s lens was very reminiscent of the art piece “Enough About You” by Titus Kapar, which literally reframed a portrait of three white men, with a black slave child as a servant in the far right:
Expertly written and thoughtfully reimagined. A very easy five star read for me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Rape
Minor: War