James
by Percival Everett
GENRE: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.
The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”
Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.
Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. - Goodreads
Booklist
/* Starred Review */ Huckleberry Finn, acclaimed by many as a great American novel, has also been sharply criticized for its racist portrayal of Jim, the childlike “Negro slave” Huck befriends on their riverboat journey. In an astounding riposte, the much-lauded Everett (Dr. No, 2022) rewrites the story as a liberation narrative, told from Jim (or rather James’) point of view. Erudite, a student of philosophy, and a calm strategic thinker, James is adept at code shifting from his normal dignified speech and behavior patterns to the shuffling, aw-shucks demeanor white folks expect, and even gives “speech translation"" lessons to the plantation's enslaved children (disturbingly similar to “The Talk” modern Black parents give their children about police encounters). When he is accused of robbery and murder, James flees with an initially gleeful Huck, who only gradually understands the terrifying reality of being a Black man with a price on his head. As Huck comes to acknowledge the depth of his relationship with James , and the ""slave's"" profound gifts, the boy is forced to recognize the illogic of white supremacy and privilege. Meanwhile James , determined to return and rescue his wife and daughter, takes the story in a completely different direction than the original, exemplifying the relentless courage and moral clarity of an honorable man with nothing to lose. An absolutely essential read. -- Lesley Williams (Reviewed 1/1/2024)
Publisher's Weekly
/* Starred Review */ As in his classic novel Erasure, Everett portrays in this ingenious retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people. Many of the same things happen as they do in Twain’s original: Jim escapes from enslavement on a Missouri farm and joins up with Huck, a white boy who’s faked his own death. Huck is fleeing from his abusive father, while Jim is hoping to find a way to free his wife and daughter. The main difference is in the telling. Jim narrates, not Huck, and in so doing he reveals how he employs “slave” talk (“correct incorrect grammar”) when white people can hear, to make them feel safe and superior. Everett also pares down the prose and adds humor in place of sentimentality. When Huck and Jim come upon a band of slave hunters, Huck claims Jim, who’s covered by a tarp, is a white man infected with smallpox (“We keep thinkin’ he gone die, then he just don’t”). Clever additions to the narrative include a tense episode in which Jim is fraudulently sold by a slaver to “Dixie” composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, who has Jim perform in blackface with his singing troupe. Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself. (Mar.)
Kirkus
/* Starred Review */ Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember. This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense. One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him. (Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2024)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Wild and Distant Seas
by Tara Karr Roberts
Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once all she needed-but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn, and her place on the island, by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out. One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. He seeks only a warm bed and a bowl of chowder, and yet suddenly, unsettlingly, her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor-engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
