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Wed. June 24, 2026

I have to admit, I was somewhat skeptical when a friend recommended I read this “reimagining” of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, as I suppose I distrust any revision of an original work I admire. But I did like The Return, after all, a reimagining of the Odyssey,  and I think James is similar in that it’s not trying to “improve” on the original as much as it commenting on that work with a modern sensibility, writing that story as it would have been written by the enslaved Jim. And it is a Pulitzer Prize winner, so it must be good.

But this narrator is James, a very different man than the Jim who was Huck’s friend in the first story, and of course that’s the point of the title. He isn’t a runaway depending on the friendship of a White boy to save him, he is a Black man, the protagonist of his own story, who saves himself, his wife, and his daughter from slavery, as well as Huck, who turns out to be (spoiler alert!) his own son. (Maybe this is the only way to redeem Huck from being White, but it seems odd that James doesn’t reveal this until late in the story, since he must know all along).

Overall, I enjoyed the novel. It’s quickly paced and dramatic, comic at times, without ever losing sight of the gravity of the predicament James is in.  The story covers some of the same incidents as in HF but from James’s point of view, showing he is fully aware of the consequences of his every action. The naive irony of Huck’s original narrative is subdued, relegated to dialog and observations by James, so the overall tone of the story is more somber. And since Huck and James are separated for significant stretches, we are able to see James acting on his own, struggling against the terrifying brutality and dehumanization of slavery. His life and freedom are always at stake, sometimes in the most humiliating circumstances, but we never lose a sense of his inherent dignity. He is James, not Jim.

While I found the story engaging and effective, I did feel at times it was rather didactic, as if I was being lectured about just how bad slavery really was (of which I have no doubt) as Everett carefully dismantles every myth of the “kind master” and “grateful slave,” misconceptions which he ruthlessly dispatches at the end of the story, along with “the Southern Gentleman,” Judge Thatcher, as James takes his vengeance. In that way, James is like the returning Odysseus, ruthless, but just.