A review by quakerquixote
James by Percival Everett

adventurous dark emotional reflective tense fast-paced

4.0

As someone who has taught Adventures of Huckleberry Finn several times, I found this book to be a very insightful engagement with Twain's novel. It highlights many of the points I would want students to understand about the original novel: Huck's troubling naiveté, the darkness of the world along the Mississippi, the necessity of understanding blackface minstrelsy, and, most of all, the savvy of James. In many ways, Everett takes the subtext of Twain's novel and makes it text. And in doing that, he surpasses the limitations of Twain and gives James a compelling story of his own.