Percival Everett offers a fresh perspective on Mark Twain’s adventure of Huck and Jim. Filled with humor, heartbreak, horror, and irony, Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is captivating, powerful and entertaining.

Jim, as one will remember, is a runaway slave, and is later thought to have murdered Huck. The pair travel down the Mississippi tumbling from one adventure to another. Instead of following Huck, the narrative travels with Jim and explores the character and the horrors of racism and slavery.

Jim runs because he is going to be sold to a new owner, and separated from his wife and daughter. From there, he bumps into Huck, who has faked his own death, and inadvertently has the town thinking Jim murdered him. So it’s off on the Mississippi and the adventures that Twain documented for the pair. Everett expands it, retells it, and relates it in an amazingly new way. With a welcome perspective.

Through it all, Jim is intent on finding a way to free his wife and daughter, as he comes up against the brutality of white men filled with hate and power.

There is a proliferation of the use of the N-word. It’s jarring, horrifying and brutal, and done purposefully. And it needs to be taken in context as we live with Jim, James, and see the world he lives in. His story interweaves constantly with Huck’s tale, popping in and out of one another’s stories, and the glimpse we get of the racist South is truly heart-rending and horrifying.

Everett weaves in a sly sense of humor through his narrative, and gives Jim a depth as he reflects the slave experience to the modern reader.

I loved this book, and while I didn’t read it all in one sitting, life got ni the way, I certainly could have. I didn’t want to put it down, and I was loving every minute of it. Everett brings James and his world to vivid life, and it makes for a fantastic story.

It’s been forever since I head The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Everett’s tale is so on point, interweaving with Twain’s tale, that I recalled character and narrative beats long forgotten. And now, we know what happened to Jim when he slipped out of Twain’s narrative.

And it’s so good. Brilliant, moving, and powerful Everett’s book is a captivating read and so well told. It works on every level. I loved it.

An important novel, a realistic look at the prejudice and racism that plague(d/s) the South (not to mention the rest of the world), Everett’s James is a must read. It’s going to make you uncomfortable, angry, joyous, and hopeful.

Read it. It’s nothing short of brilliant.