afjakandy 's review for:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

---

Huck Finn is such a challenging book for me because it's impossible to divorce the story from the context of the world I live in—but I also recognize the cleverness of Twain's writing. I see the extraordinary nuance lying just beneath the surface of Huck's outlandish shenanigans and the deeply uncomfortable portrayal of Jim. Toni Morrison said it best in her 1996 introduction to the book:

For a hundred years, the argument that this novel is has been identified, reidentified, examined, waged and advanced. What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature,
which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.

I read this in preparation for Percival Everett's James, who said this of both his book and Twain's in a 2024 PBS interview:

If you get someone laughing, then you have removed some defenses. You have removed some walls. And then you can show them the bad things.

.
So, is Huck Finn a good book or not? I couldn't say, but it is certainly remarkable.

I also have to leave this quote from Morrison's intro here because it made me so emotional:

Earlier I posed the question, What does Huck need to live without despair and thoughts of suicide? My answer was, Jim.