#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more. "Genius"—The Atlantic • "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."—Chicago Tribune • "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."—The Boston Globe • "Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."—The New York Times 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 cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

The main takeaway we had from Everett's James is that Everett is trying to challenge you. He challenges you by showing Jim as highly literature and eloquent when not pretended in front of white people. He challenges you by creating backstory to Huck Finn about Jim's solo adventures and reasons for his interest in Huck that completely change the novel. He challenges you by deliberating straying from the plot of the original at some points and creating a fantasy story of his own. But that we think is the point of James -- to force us to look at the story a new way and dare us to doubt its reality when we were willing to accept a more superstitious and silly Jim in Twain's novel. How much this works is a topic of debate. For the most part, we really like the first two thirds of the novel. Everett creates a really compelling character in Jim, someone who struggles with ethical thinking and the harsh needs of survival while trying to express an intellectual humanity. Everett also makes concrete the horrors of Twain's setting in a very effective way, showing with a deft level of bluntness the violence and abuse of the slavery-era South. There are many, many good sections of James that reframe throwaway moments in Huck Finn devastatingly (the steamboat engineer stands out as truly horrifying) and for that, we were really happy we read it. On the other hand, almost everyone in NUBClub felt there were missteps Everett made in the plot. For some, it was the choices about the relationship between Jim and Huck; for others, it was the philosophical interludes; and for yet others, it was the wholly invented ending. But since we felt that the project of James was to provoke us, even those missteps landed with some curiosity. All of this is on top of the things that Everett typically does well -- exploring the complex ambiguities of race. It's a very enlightening view to have James look at characters that pass as white or minstrel shows in Huck's world and it works very well to remind us that Twain's universe is still quite starkly black and white when the reality was much more muddled. It was very hard for us to imagine James as a standalone book; so much is referencing Huck Finn that you would really miss a lot of the meaning without it. But we generally recommended it as a companion to Huck Finn. Everett has written a beautiful and powerful novel that sits as a different version of Twain's project, another debunking of myths, but this time it's our assumptions Everett wants to tackle. It's worth another trip down the river for that.