“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”
“With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”
Confession: I’ve never read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn OR Adventures Tom Sawyer. (I was very dedicated in charting my path towards a Masters in English to avoid as much of the “dead white guy” canon as I could.) That said, so much of Mark Twain is embedded in everything, particularly in other works even to this day, that I’m somewhat familiar with both Tom and Huck and their boyhood adventures in the South. When I saw that Percival Everett was releasing a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I was already sold. You know I love those “the empire writes back” retellings.
Everett has one of the more unique voices and storytelling prowess of authors I’ve read in a long while, and while his novels are dark and weighty, they are full of wit and charm and a humor that perseveres. James (Doubleday 2024), a retelling from the perspective of the slave Jim, did not disappoint.
Admittedly, it is very hard to review the novel because so much of what makes it work is experiencing the unexpected wrapped in the known, and I think readers would benefit from just jumping in and letting James’s story happen to them. From a “writing back” standpoint, Everett does provide an ending that is less “white savior” and more resilient as it reclaims a narrative; there is something profoundly powerful in that clear deviation from Twain’s adventurous lads and the intentional act of James putting his words on paper.
If you’re a diehard Twain fan, you probably won’t like this novel. I would, however, recommend that you give it a go. And, of course, I will always recommend that you read Everett’s The Trees.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 