Book Review: James by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: March 19, 2024
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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.

James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. It’s not necessary to read Huckelberry Finn first but I did and I think I got more out of it that way. It’s still a five-star read no matter what. In Huck Finn, Jim is portrayed as naive and not very smart. In James, we discover that it’s all an act. Enslaved people act dumb and speak in the slave dialect as a form of self-protection. They know that white people would feel threatened if they knew that their slaves were just as smart, if not smarter, than them. I loved seeing James’s point of view of his interactions with Huck. For instance, in Huckelberry Finn, Huck convinces Jim that an incident that actually happened was just a dream. Jim freaks out and thinks he’s going crazy. Then Huck tells him the truth and feels bad for tricking Jim. In James, James knows that Huck is tricking him and goes along with it because he has affection for Huck and knows that it’s fun for Huck to pull a prank like that on him. He also knows that it’s expected that he’s dumb enough to fall for something like that.

I think James is a more realistic portrayal of Black people in those times than Huckelberry Finn. Of course they were intelligent. But if people acknowledged that, it might be harder to treat them as subhuman. I wondered reading Huck Finn if enslaved people actually talked with that dialect. I had to switch to audio because I couldn’t even understand Jim’s dialogue as it was written. In James, when James speaks in the slave dialect, it’s written in a way that you can understand what he’s saying.

James was my book club’s February selection. It’s a great book for discussion – we had a lot to talk about. I don’t want to tell you too much about the plot, but a lot happened to him that was eye-opening for us. Some of us had read Huck Finn so we could compare and contrast it with James as part of our discussion.

James deservedly won almost every book award there is in 2024. I highly, highly recommend it.