A solid read. The middle section of this book, once Huck is offscreen, is REALLY good. The first 40%, in which we're basically reproducing events from Huck Finn, got a bit repetitive for me. But once Jim (or James, rather) is on his own things really pick up. I REALLY liked the twist at the end - fascinating subtext to think about! - and I liked Jim's adventures; they definitely kept me turning the pages. This book reminded me of "Kindred" and "Parable of the Talents", via the different set-pieces/scenes that evoke how brutal life was for slaves (especially the sawmill section). I'm very interested in reading interviews by this author once this book comes out - overall, this was a great concept.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

James by Percival Everett

I first read Huckleberry Finn when I was 12 years old. It was our class reader - red, tatty and with countless other pupils names crossed out inside the front cover. My enduring memory was one of a rousing adventure around The Mississippi River. Now, nearly 40 years later, reacquainted with Huck and slave Jim, is an opportunity to relive some of those adventures seen through Jim’s eyes. I’m not sure if it this new interpretation, my advancing age or whether my recollection is clouded by the passing of so many years, but the adventure, although much in evidence, is greatly overshadowed by the despicable racism and unbearable cruelty of slave era America. Jim, now James is able to show us, the readers, his bravery and intellect, instead of hiding it from the white folks of the story.

This is a magnificently paced, beautifully written novel.It is also a reminder that the value of human life in monetary terms is an abomination; of the wretchedness and absurdity of intolerance.
One of the books of the year.

#docs.reading.room

Published 11 April 2024. I'm not sure if I ever read 'Huck Finn' when I was younger, but a knowledge of the book was not needed for this novel which has been described as funny, but I found it anything but. I found it hard to read at times, harrowing even. While in the 'Huck Finn' novel, Jim, the slave, is very much a secondary character - I believe - here he is the main voice. We hear his voice, but here he is not Jim, he is James. He can read and write, he discusses philosophy with John Locke in his dreams, he looks out for his wife and daughter and has compassion for those around him. The book opens with extracts from Daniel Emmett's notebook, lines written in slave language, but written by a white man who appears in the novel. And so you have the idea that the masters expect slaves to talk and act in a certain way and this is what we see in James. The book opens with James/Jim waiting for Miss Watson to give him some cornbread. He talks to her in the way that she expects but once he is in his own space with his wife and daughter, his speech changes. There is one part where he is teaching the children how to speak to the white folk. So through the novel you get to see James as eloquent and smart and you feel for his condition, the fact that he is owned. So when he learns that he is to be sold and taken from his wife and daughter, he runs away. He is joined by Huck who has also run away from his abusive father and the two set out together down the river. James knows that the way he speaks impacts on the way people see him so he has to always make sure that he uses slave language around Huck although you get the impression that Huck likes James/Jim. But as the novel progresses, the author does not pull any punches with his graphic scenes of violence against slaves and although I believe that the story almost follows the 'Huck Finn' original at the beginning, we soon take a different and more treacherous path. And as for the ending - WOW! Rounded up to 5*

In James, Percival Everett combines an enthralling plot with a subversive message tinged with a dark humour.

Taking Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as his starting point, Everett tells the story of Jim the black slave who appears in the book. At the height of the book's popularity, the vast majority of Twain's white readership would have at best held black people in low esteem and at worst not even seen them as people. James is, therefore, a reclaiming of the narrative and an invitation to confront a past where such views not only went unchallenged but were immortalised as part of the American literary canon.

I am so grateful to black writers like Everett who use their talent to give voice to characters like Jim. There is a reason why white slave owners were so resolute in their determination to stop their slaves from ever learning to read or write. There is power in the written word and in having the agency to tell your own story.

140 years after Twain's book was first published, Everett has given us the opportunity to read Jim's story in his own words and it is a truly transformative experience. I do not use this word lightly but in my view James is a masterpiece and a must-read.

What a fantastic book! I love the story of Huckleberry Finn so I enjoyed this book which is from the viewpoint of Jim. It’s thought provoking and heartbreaking. It does have humour scattered throughout. Overall, a brilliant read.

James by Percival Everett: A Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Everett’s "James" is a compelling reimagining of Twain's classic, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", seen through the eyes of Jim (who prefers James), now the protagonist and narrator. This shift in perspective adds a fresh twist and brings it up to date and deftly handles the problematic parts of the original.
For those not familiar with the story, Huck, fleeing his abusive father, and Jim, an enslaved man seeking freedom, journey together down the Mississippi River, navigating untrustworthy characters and situations.
The novel explores race, prejudice and the intricacies of trust and human connection in the face of adversity.
There was humour and farce, pain and suffering, as well as love and sacrifice. I rushed through the 300-ish pages and would definitely recommend it.

As with many readers Percival Everett first came to my attention with his novel “The Trees” - a very hard hitting, explicit and directly confrontational expose of the USA’s violent and racist 20th Century history of lynching which used humour, stereotyping (of white characters) and also the genre conventions of a detective novel in an extremely effective way to draw readers into something they would otherwise shy away from.

That novel of course was Booker shortlisted, which listing seemed like a long overdue international recognition of an influential, prolific, versatile but often overlooked literary author.

And this book – interestingly not published by his usual indy combination of Greywolf Press (US) and Influx (UK) but by the PHR group in the US and Pan MacMillan in the UK - will I suspect lead to his first big US literary prize win: one of the Pulitzer or National Book Awards would seem appropriate – and I would be far from surprised to see this doing very well on the Booker also.

The book is a rewriting of the often-claimed Great American Novel, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” – one I think well known to many US readers.

For UK readers, who I suspect are much less familiar with that work, I would recommended reading it immediately before reading this.

I did and found that even putting aside the problematical elements (the speech used for Jim and the other slaves, the constant use of inappropriate of the N-word) the plot was a combination of Just William style children’s start and ending (with the clear sense of danger and existential jeopardy to Jim somehow lost) sandwiching a literally drifting plot as Jim and Huck escaped down the Mississippi. My favourite part was the rather amusing opening note (“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot”).

And brilliantly this novel turns almost everything on its head.

Oddly – but perhaps part of turning my views on their head - my least favourite part of the novel was its opening – a rather too long extract from the lyric notebook of the leader of a group of Black and White Minstrels whose surname Emmett I assumed was a nod to the real life lynching victim Emmett Till whose murderers are the first victims of “The Trees”)

But from there everything I felt worked really well.

The novel has the same opening scene – with Huck and Tom Sawyer playing a trick on Jim, but here immediately it is Jim who on one level has the agency in the scene “It always pays to give white folks what they want” he thinks and deliberately sets himself up to be tricked. I sat “on one level” as while rewriting the life of “a significant literary figure who never had any agency” is what Everett has said drew him to this project.

And in Chapter 2, the other main aspect - the problematical language/speech – is immediately bought into play, in a scene when James (as he is known to his family) sits down with his wife Sadie, daughter Lizzie and a group of other children to remind them of how to speak in front of white folk: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”

That becomes a recurring joke through the novel – Everett as in “The Trees” tends to repeat his satire – with not just James (extremely well read from his master’s library – with a particular interest in Voltiare and John Locke who even visit him in dreams to debate their ideas) but all of the blacks able to converse fluently but immediately switching to the speech of the slaves in “Huckleberry Finn” when in earshot of whites.

As in that novel, Finn (assumed murdered possibly by his alcoholic father) and Jim/James (who has escaped to avoid being traded away from his family – form an uneasy alliance and make an escape together down the river.

"Dusk came on, and with the fog we figured it was okay to set out. The Mississippi is swifter than it looks. It’s scary, for that reason. You can mess around in some branches and backwaters and start to think it’s gentle and then you get out into it and it’s a different story."

What is far more present in this novel is that Jim is permanently scared. The real fear of discovery/capture that dogs Jim’s every step – fear of being at best sold away from his family and at worst being brutally beaten and murdered (something later bought home to him in a harrowing scene involving retribution for a stolen pencil).

And when Everett has stopped being forced to follow the branches and backwaters of Twain’s novel – which is effectively up to when the two meet the con-men (the King and the Duke) – Everett takes the novel into a very different story. Far from the rather gently comical swindlers of the original novel those two are immediately focused on beating and selling Jim for gain and when Jim escapes and is captured his release is via the leader of the aforementioned Minstrels, who down a tenor decide to add for the first time (at least knowingly) a black man to their ranks – although James soon finds another of the minstrels is actually a white-passing slave.

As James adventures to continue – the book introduces two late twists: one directly relevant to and challenging the standard interpretation of Jim and Huck’s friendship (which I think will mean more to those more invested in the original); the other the very clever introduction of the first stages of the Civil War which allows Everett to further examine a theme which has run through the novel (white saviour complex) in a cross-history way. It then ends with something of a positive ending.

Overall an excellent piece of writing.

James is Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of N-word Jim. My review’s full of spoiler-y stuff so if you’re planning to read this book and that sorta thing bothers you, stop reading the review now. But if you’re simply after a TL/DR version of this review: Everett’s novel is unnecessary, adds little - worse, detracts even - to the original source material and Twain’s novel remains the better book to read of the two, yes, including the “problematic” language and racial stereotypes.

If you’ve not read Huck Finn before, the story is set in pre-civil war America, in Missouri, one of the slave states, where Huck Finn, a young white roustabout, and a runaway slave, Jim, go on the run together along the Mississippi River - adventures ensue. In Twain’s novel, the two are separated and Huck becomes hostage to a couple of con artists before being reunited with Jim for the final act of the story.

Everett retells Twain’s story and then adds his own material once Huck and James are separated. His contribution is that James and a white-passing black man called Norman hatch upon a scheme to sell James, then James runs away once Norman pockets the cash, and they repeat this until James has enough money to buy his family from slavery and head north. There’s also a very corny Hollywood-esque ending that’s more uplifting for James than the one in Twain’s novel, and Everett reveals that Huck is James’ son - this last detail is probably the most controversial.

Did we need a retelling of Huck Finn? No. Everett’s story is not compelling enough. It more realistically details the horrors of slavery (the sequence with James, Norman and a teenage slave called Sammy is particularly harrowing) and does what I think it sets out to do, namely portray James as a real person and not a racist cartoon. In this novel, the slaves pretend to speak in a cartoonish slave’s voice, as they did in Twain’s novel (and other media from yesteryear) but really speak normal English when not around white ears, in many cases better than the white characters themselves. James strives for dignity and equity in a time and place where both were unheard of for black people and so he’s very easily a sympathetic character.

The story as Twain told it was originally interesting, but re-reading it in Everett’s hands is less so as there’s not much added to it. James encounters more horrors that we’ve seen him encounter and it’s repetitive and grim for the sake of grimness.

Does anyone read Huck Finn today and think black people are the racist cartoons that appeared in the narrative? I don’t think so. Though I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that there were some black people who were like this back then either hence why Twain chose to write them like that - there was no ulterior agenda at play for him. Twain’s portrayal of black characters may be racial stereotypes but they’re not enduring ones, and the novel itself, including Huck, are so anti-racist and progressive, especially for its time, that it’s amazing so many people are willing to condemn Twain and his novel because he used the n-word liberally without considering anything else about the book’s contents.

And what was the point of making Huck James’ son? On one level it felt like petty points-scoring against a long-dead author who can’t object - like Everett was claiming this iconic American literary character as “one of theirs” and, not as the white establishment believes, “theirs” - nyah nyah nyah nyaaah! It’s also not his character to change so dramatically.

Part of the beauty of Twain’s character is that Huck sees the injustice of slavery and decides for himself that it’s wrong - at a time when he’s literally told that if he helps a slave it’s a “sin”. Huck isn’t being progressive for fashionable reasons, he’s doing it because he’s a humanitarian. He isn’t choosing to treat Jim as an equal because he’s half-black himself but because that’s how he sees Jim and all black people - he recognises their common humanity.

It’s important that Huck is white because he represents the future society, the better society, that Twain wanted to hold up to his audience, at a time when Jim Crow was in full swing, and point to as an example of what we should aspire to be, and he wanted that audience - primarily white - to see themselves in Huck and replicate his behaviour, to make that vision a reality.

Huck and Jim’s relationship is one of the great literary friendships in part because they’re two individuals who bond over their shared humanity and experiences, not because they’re related. It feels like Everett’s revision of Huck diminishes the character’s obvious qualities that makes him such a unique literary creation for no good reason whatsoever.

I can understand wanting to give James a better ending than the one he got in Huck Finn but the ending of this novel is down there with the trashiest fan-fic - it’s pure Hollywood cheese. A bad ending to a bad novel.

Percival Everett’s James provides greater, more realistic detail of the antebellum south than you get in Twain’s Huck Finn, though any decent history book will do the same, so that hardly makes Everett’s novel a necessary companion piece to Twain’s. It’s also well-written, as all of Everett’s novels are. But Twain’s Huck Finn remains the only novel of this story worth reading - James is ultimately a pointless addition that’s little more than reactionary fan fiction, as much a product of our time as Twain’s novel was of his.

Very good indeed. I read ‘The Trees’, which was my introduction to this author. That was tree-mendous. ‘James’ similarly provides first-rate writing and story telling. The author is certainly gifted and this is a truly literary endeavour. Everett deserves to be acclaimed as one of a handful of genuinely great modern writers. I salute you, sir. As well as a re-telling and exploration of the Huckleberry Finn story of Mr. Twain, this book is a no-holds barred account of the savagery and brutality of the latter slave years in the United States of America. What’s more, this is not a pure fictional historic reckoning as there are present day lessons to be learned. Highly recommended for serious-minded readers, as well as those who just want a darned good story. I received a free review copy from NetGalley and Pan MacMillan and this is an independent, personal and frank review. My thanks to NetGalley and to Pan MacMillan.
Reviewed on Goodreads.

I couldn't put this book down after I started reading it, which was the same with Percival Everett's previous book The Trees which I equally loved. I can't recommend it more and I love how the author is able to tightrope that line between really dark, difficult themes and lightness.

In 2022, Percival Everett's book - The Trees - was one of my favourites on the Booker Prize shortlist. I thought it had a strong chance of winning the award that year, but my guess turned out to be inaccurate.

Now, two years later - and many months away from a longlist announcement let alone a winner reveal - I have a strong feeling Everett is in with another chance.

The US author's latest novel - James - is due to be released later this spring. I have been able to get my hands on an advance copy of the title.

The novel is a - kind of - reworking of Mark Twain's The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Only. it is done through the eyes of Huck's friend: the slave named Jim.

Part of the book contains some of the events from Twain's novel. However, it does so from Jim's first person narrative.

If you've read the original novel with Huck Finn as the main character you'll be aware there are parts in the story where Huck and Jim are separated. Well, that's where Everett creates his own spin-off to Jim's story creating some dark irony along the way.

By the end of the work, with Huck Finn and the titular character reunited, Everett creates a bombshell moment that could result in you rereading the Tom and Huck books with a totally different mind.

As I stated in my opening, I think James is award worthy. I loved it.

This was astonishingly good. I grew up reading Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and of the two stories I always preferred Tom Sawyer because it wasn't as scary and obviously problematic. I couldn't imagine what Percival Everett would do to a story that was already so firmly embedded in my imagination. What he did with it was to give it a totally new life without destroying the original tale. It is a seamless merging of old and new in such a way that held me from the first page. I loved this. I started and finished it in one day because I absolutely had to know what happened. I literally couldn't put it down. Sharp, clever, angry and so full of heart and soul. It's a masterpiece. James is a triumph as a character and as a voice of the oppressed.

I thought The Trees couldn’t be bettered, but in his new novel James, Percival Everett has somehow topped it. The book is about Jim, the enslaved character from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and reimagines that story.

From the start, it’s darkly funny, absurd and satirical and turns an American classic on its head. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn but a quick Wiki plot breakdown was all that was needed as the narrative really belongs to Jim. When he overhears that he’s to be sold and separated from his wife and daughter, he hides out to formulate a plan but becomes embroiled with Huckleberry Finn who is also running from his violent father.

Jim and Huck sail the Mississippi River, meeting danger and misadventure. I’m deliberately vague about the plot as a lot of the enjoyment for me was the surprise of the narrative with a very big reveal towards the end of the book. I just loved it: absurdist, grim, brutal and graphic. It is a difficult read at times but also necessary.

I’m still pondering what Everett is saying with James but I was reminded of Zadie Smith’s brilliant recent book, The Fraud, as both seem to explore liberty, freedom and what life is worth without these. Hugely recommended and must be one of the best books of 2024.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

I'm afraid this book wasn't for me. Maybe I'll eventually read a review or an interview with the author that unlocks it for me, but until then, it's left me a bit baffled. It's sold as a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, but it could easily have done without that as it diverges from the source book's plot pretty much immediately. At first I was irritated by the plot inconsistencies, then I decided that the story details were different because the narrators were different and had different memories of what had happened.

But Jim in James is not Jim in Huckleberry Finn. They're entirely different characters. The world of James posits that slaves, in secret, all speak as if they're college educated. They only put on the slave dialect to fool white people, because white people get angry and dangerous if they think slaves are better than they are. It makes zero sense and uncomfortably implies that Jim would be less worthy as a person, less able to be taken seriously, if he really spoke like Jim speaks in Huckleberry Finn. I'm guessing it's the author's reaction to Jim sounding a bit cartoonish in the original book? Although apparently Mark Twain did extensive research on slave dialect. Again, maybe I'm just not getting it.

The other major change that didn't work for me was Jim's sudden admission that he was really Huck's father. We'd been inside Jim's head the entire novel and he'd never once had any thought that hinted at such. It felt completely out of nowhere and had zero effect on the story. The only reason I can guess it was included was to hammer in that all white people in James were evil, so Huck couldn't be white. Like, I'm not complaining about white people being portrayed as evil in a book about slavery. It's a given. It just felt like Everett needed to come up with an explanation for why Jim cared about Huck, other than just the fact that Huck was a poor, abused orphan on the run.

The ending felt like a Quentin Tarantino movie. There were real slave rebellions before the Civil War (and I'm thinking about how much more I'd have liked this book if Everette had just written a fictionalised biography of Nat Turner) but in context, especially when combined with the whole "slaves were only faking their dialect" thing, it felt like wish fulfilment with a side of "If only slaves had rebelled against their masters, they could have escaped and been free", which is clearly nonsense.

I also felt like the quality of the writing trailed sharply off towards the later half of the book and became very simplistic and rushed feeling. Reading other reviews, I'm the only one I can see who had any of these issues, so maybe it's just me. Maybe it will suddenly all click and I'll come back and revise this. Ultimately, though, I did not enjoy this book.

James is, in its simplest sense, a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the slave Jim. The original is loved and criticised (particularly around its complex handling of race relations) in equal parts, and Everett engages with it with a similar mix of obvious love for the source material and a clear sense of purpose in its interrogation of some of its more problematic aspects.

It begins by following the story relatively closely, so we get Huck and Jim/James uniting on their escape along the Mississippi, the former escaping the wrath of his abusive 'Pap' and the latter the overheard threat of being sold (and thus separated permanently from his wife and daughter). The early 'adventures' (as characterized by Huck in the original; here they take on a more fearful nature as we understand that from Jim's perspective every move carries with it life-threatening peril based on his status as an escaped slave) are present and correct, right up to the encounter with the conmen known as the King and the Duke. From here, and the first major separation between the two protagonists, things begin to deviate from the original in ways that it would be far too spoilerish to discuss in detail here.

The usual question with adaptations of this nature is whether or not a detailed understanding of the source material is necessary to appreciate the new work. I usually have a fairly clear view on this: the new work either lives as a standalone or it's not worth bothering with. And this one certainly meets that criteria. Even with no knowledge of Huck Finn you will get a gripping thriller, suffused with threat and tension; an obvious critique of racism in the US - both in the era of slavery and in the obvious parallels with what still happens to this day; and bucketloads of Everett's trademark super-dark humour. So that's a tick. But is this case it's probably also true that at least a basic understanding of the original, both its content and its subsequent role in US cultural history, adds a significant amount. That's because, I think, this is neither a straightforward reverent retelling (a la Demon Copperhead) nor an outright satirical inversion of / attack on the original. It's more complex than that, in that all of the above works because of Everett's obvious respect for the original, but that extra layer of the retelling from Jim/James' perspective has a more interesting dialogue with the original, playing with its themes and subsequent interpretations in a variety of ways that add massively to the reading experience.

Probably the most commented on, and most consistently entertaining and incisive aspect of James is Everett's conceit that the language spoken by the slaves in the original is purely performance for their white 'massas' - a deliberate dumbing down / playing to expectations that allows their owners and other white folks to maintain their illusion of superiority and elevated (more 'human' in their eyes) status, while at the same time swerving potential conflict from appearing too much like them, ie an intellectual threat (or perhaps worse, an equal!) This is a simple idea, but brilliantly sustained and explored throughout the book, with the idea of race as performance reaching a dizzyingly brilliant peak as James joins a band of travelling minstrels. Again, I won't give too much away about that section but it's typical Everett brilliance. Anyone who has read any other of his work - especially, of course, Erasure - will know that this concept of race as performance is of significant and enduring interest to him as an author. Cross-referencing his present-day set works reinforces the sense that none of what's described in James is unique to the pre-Abolition era.

The novel, even in its darkest moments, draws on aspects of the original's sense of adventure (even if, as mentioned, it's a heavily subversive take on this genre) and it even carries us along (via some very grim pathways) to a sense that James is allowed a kind of redemptive justice by its denouement. But ultimately the clues dropped throughout the novel to the slaves' parallels with treatment of Black people in the modern world (from microaggressions through to outright brutal violence) point only in one direction: any 'victory' or 'revenge' achieved by James in this book is nothing more than a temporary fantasy. The suffering and maltreatment will endure. James in the novel is a writer as well as a reader, carrying with him a (fateful) pencil and stolen notebook throughout, and we get a sense that as the novel deviates further from the source material we are increasingly reading James' own fantasy, writing his own idealised destiny even if he knows he can never truly live it.

This is another brilliant book from a writer who seems to finally be coming to justified wider global attention. I'm sad it's taken me this long to get to his work but equally very grateful to the Booker for having introduced me to him. I'll be very surprised if this one doesn't receive similar, if not even greater, accolades in 2024.

(9.5/10)

I can’t remember the last time I was so captivated by a book I read it while walking down the street (well, tried to, anyway). James was that book for me. Percival Everett has created a masterful novel, and I can’t wait to see the impact of James.

Admittedly, I’ve never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I know!), but I enjoyed Everett’s The Trees so much that I couldn’t wait to see what he did with this “classic” story. I did some more reading up on the plot before diving into James – though I actually don’t think this was necessary. We follow Jim, an enslaved man, who escapes and journeys down the Mississippi River with Huckleberry Finn, a white child escaping his abusive father. Jim strives to reach freedom and eventually rescue his own family. More than that, though, our main character gradually speaks and writes his own identity into being.

Everett’s work with language is stunning; he writes with such ease and propulsive energy. In James, characters are both humanised and dehumanised based on their relationship with language, and on how they are able to present themselves to other people. We quickly learn, for example, that Jim and most enslaved characters craft a type of speech that they use only in front of white people. Privately, they speak as their true, full selves. You can imagine how much of a pivotal role this plays in Jim’s story. Throughout the book, Everett plays with selfhood in a way that makes a well-known “adventure” story feel so immediate and bursting with humanity.

Through a ferocious, action-packed plot with plenty of incredibly dark moments (and yes, a couple of funny ones), Everett has weaved such a rich story that I feel no great desire to reach back to the novel it’s based on. This is the story I choose. I could not tear myself away from this novel, and found myself staring into space once I’d finished it; I was desperate not to leave Jim – James – behind.

Many, many thanks to Pan MacMillan for the advanced copy.

Wow - just wow! This was a fantastic read. Percival Everett retells 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' from the point of view of his companion, Jim, the runaway slave. Although there are some deviations from the original story, it didn't matter. The tale was heartwarming and humorous yet raised the elephant in the room - the injustice inhumanity and indignity of slavery. .I was worried when I chose this as I knew I would be revisiting childhood friends and was worried I wouldn't enjoy the book; instead, it left me thinking...

When I heard about the premise for this book I knew that I had to read it. Obviously retellings are a popular device, but I was very invested in James from the beginning. The decision to label the book as comedy is a confusing one, although there are humorous moments. But as high as my hopes were for a Pulitzer finalist author I did find that a lot of moments fell flat because in my opinion, the author relies heavily on a few tricks throughout the story and as it moves forward they lose the power to surprise. The code switching, a masterstroke upon first reading, is explained again and again as every new character right up to the very end is introduced. James, at first dropping occasional quotes and also having full blown philosophical debates eventually goes to sleep and dreams of a philosopher so this begins to feel like the self inserted interest of the author that becomes stale the more it too is retread. The bombshell of Huck's father seemed a flimsy addition. Not enough was made of it before or after the announcement so I really didn't feel that it had any intended impact except shock value and that greatly disappointed me. Maybe in a story that was about James, it just seemed unnecessary.

Magnificent! Percival Everett’s re-working of Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is a must-read. Told from the narrative perspective of Jim, Everett somehow manages to remind the reader of the original novel, whilst at the same time giving the story fresh impetus and vibrancy.

Jim is clever, articulate and deeply empathetic - traits that he has to hide due to his lowly status as a slave in the Deep South during the 1840s. Worried that he is about to be sold to a different owner in New Orleans, he leaves Hannibal as a runaway and encounters an array of characters. Fans of the original will already know something of his relationship with Huck. However, Everett is only just getting started! This is a powerful narrative. Sometimes funny, other times deeply moving and always utterly gripping … ‘James’ conveys the horror of slavery and the importance of human connection.

I was absolutely mesmerised by The Trees, so I jumped at the chance to read Everett’s new book, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from slave Jim’s perspective. Once again the author has written a captivating and gripping novel. He doesn’t shy away from the horrors of slavery and some parts were gut wrenching. Everett managed to create a suspenseful and masterfully written novel which somehow rings true against the original Huck Finn. A fantastic read - I really must get to his back catalogue soon.