Simone and Her Books

“I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.”

Well, I’m so glad I’m able to add another favorite of 2024 to my list before the year ended. This is the retelling of Huck Finn through the eyes of James, the enslaved Black man who follows Huck throughout the story. However, instead of whatever sense of adventure you’d get in Huck Finn, you see an incredibly intelligent man looking for freedom for his family and himself.

Here’s more about James

A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and ferociously funny—told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Find it on Amazon | Find it on Bookshop.org

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My thoughts

Through this retelling, James is a highly intellectual human being who misses reading books and writing stories and ponders philosophers like Voltaire and Jon Locke. And while he’s incredibly articulate, he as well as the other Black people in the story, speak in a dialect of English that’s obviously learned from hearing others speak it than from a formal education. This is one of the first clues into the story you’re about to read. It’s about the prejudices and stereotypes put on Black people because of where they come from, how they were brought about, and how we perceive them as enslaved people.

When James finds out that he’s being sold off, he decides to run away in hopes of finding means to buy his own family and free them together. There he meets Huck Finn, a young white boy who has known James all his life and considers him his best friend. From there, they travel across the Mississippi river in hopes of running away from those looking for them. I can only imagine this being some sort of adventure for Huck, but it’s not that way for James. If anything, there’s terror and fear all throughout the story as James hides from white people, tries to pass as a white person playing Black, meets other white people intent on selling him for money. There’s threats to his life around every corner.

The story rivals that of Homer’s Odyssey. The travels across the country meeting different people, facing challenges in hopes of returning to his family is just a glimpse into James’s world at that point. I found the different characters he comes across to be intriguing like the white-passing Black man or the enslaved Black people who were happy to be slaves. The depth and breadth of life Percival Everett put into each character really immerses you into the story hoping for those who are friendly to James and cursing those who aren’t. Through his expert storytelling and character development, you really come to know that James is more than just some companion -he could almost be a real person.

Overall, this book truly blew me away and the fact that Percival Everett was able to deliver such a story in so few pages is really astounding. This is my second book read from this author and knowing he has a long backlog of books makes me excited to pick out another story from him and find myself immersed in yet another expertly created world.