Review:
This book is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from Jim's perspective. In Everett's version of the story, everything Jim says and does in the original story is an act designed to play into the way the white people around him believe slaves should speak and behave. In reality, however, Jim is secretly more literate than many of the white people around him.
Although the first half of this, in particular, is a fairly faithful retelling of the original story, it wraps up in ways that are completely different.
My book club opted to read the original Adventures of Huckleberry Finn prior to getting into this. However, I found it to be really rough reading and ended up skimming the bulk of it and relying on summaries I read online. James, thankfully, was a much smoother and easier read, despite being much more direct in its depiction of the ugliness and cruelty of slavery.
That said, this book wasn't without its problems. I wish Everett had stayed more true to the Jim he'd written, all the way through. The Jim he'd written would never have suggested that his Black companion, who could pass for white, should pretend to be his owner, sell him, wait for him to escape, and then do it all over again elsewhere. The Jim he'd written would have known this was a stupid and likely suicidal idea that could go wrong in a million ways.
The "choose one or the other" moment near the end also didn't make much sense. Was a choice even necessary? One person could theoretically have taken care of themselves for a bit, while the other was guaranteed to die without help. Everett set up a big reveal designed to explain why Jim made the choice he did and, in fact, why he'd stuck with Huck from the start, but that just introduced more questions, none of which Everett was inclined to even recognize existed, much less answer.
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