AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from ...

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.