Barbara's Reviews > James

This cleverly written revisionist version of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is brilliant and a must-read, whether you've read the original book or not. In it, the author brings to life Jim, Huck's enslaved company on his raft journey on the Mississippi River. James is fully fleshed out here with a wife and daughter and under the threat of being sold elsewhere and being separated from his loved ones. He decides to run away until he can come up with a plan to keep his family together just as Huck runs off for reasons of his own. So much happens to James--and to Huck, who is present for part of Jim's journey but not all of it--along the way as they hide on an island and then float away, catching fish and eating berries to survive. Readers familiar with the Black dialect in the original book will find it here again, but turned on its head as the Black characters here are quite articulate, able to express themselves perfectly in the King's English but switching to dialect around whites. They only speak correctly around each other. Jim loves to read and has often secretly perused the volumes in Judge Thatcher's library. He also wants to write his story and the story of his people, and his simple request for a pencil leads to tragedy. While there are a few elements of the story that are humorous, those are overshadowed by the constant threats to his very survival Jim faces as he ends up running for his life due to various circumstances beyond his control. But always, always, always, he keeps his family in mind and his goal of somehow freeing them. At one point he ends up as part of a minstrel show with the bizarre necessity of pretending to be a white man wearing Black face, the absurdity of which does not escape him. The only aspect of the book that left me disappointed was the revelation of the true nature of his relationship with Huck, something that I won't remark on for fear of spoiling it for others. This is one of the books from 2024 that should be on everyone's reading list. It's gripping, intense, and filled with graphic scenes of violence that show just how poorly enslaved individuals were treated in the years right before the Civil War.