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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 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 KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • 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 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. Read more
Publisher : Doubleday
Publication date : March 19, 2024
Edition : First Edition
Language : English
Print length : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385550367
ISBN-13 : 69
Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
Dimensions : 5.75 x 1.06 x 8.56 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Fiction Satire #3 in Black & African American Historical Fiction (Books) #27 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Hardcover
Percival Everett's James is a rarity: A buzzy literary novel that absolutely lives up to (and possibly exceeds) the hype. I wouldn't be surprised if James came away with both the 2024 Man Booker and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. The setup for James almost sounds like a gimmick — it's a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. But Jim is so much more than a mere runaway, and author Percival Everett employs a fascinating usage of dialect that challenges the classic "slave vernacular" questionably used by writers like Twain in the 19th century. Written in a clear and accessible prose and propelled by an episodic narrative structure, James often reads like a thriller and avoids the pretentious literary stylings so common in the genre. Percival Everett also does a masterful job blending tone — despite the intensity of the subject matter, there were multiple times when I laughed out loud. But James doesn't shy away from the horrors of chattel slavery, and while the violence is never gratuitous, the resigned matter-of-fact depictions of the institution's inherent psychological and physical cruelty hits just as hard as any graphic blow-by-blow account. Additionally, throughout Jim's travels, he encounters various personalities who provide the opportunity for rich discussions on the southern mindset toward slavery at the time. Funny and bleak, adventurous and timely, James is a brilliant reimagining of an American classic that ranks as one of the very best books of the year. It's both a respectful homage and instructive critique of the source material, while also daring to tell its own unique story. Note: Do you have to have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to enjoy James? I don't think so. Though I haven't read Huck Finn, I do have a passing familiarity with the story from watching the 1993 live-action Disney adaptation starring a young Elijah Wood. But James is designed to stand on its own (and, besides, its not a true 1:1 companion piece). However, I think James is so good — and offers such a canon-busting take on a beloved classic — that I'd love to see it incorporated in high school curriculum alongside Huck Finn
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Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2024 by Joe Terrell
Format: Kindle
James Percival Everett 2024 - Doubleday Is this really the best of all possible worlds? ‘Cause frankly, this world kind of sucks! I was born in Missouri. As a teenager, I grew up in northeast Missouri, in a small town called Milan, a two-hour drive from the Mississippi River. I once dated a guy from Edina, which is just due south of Memphis, where my favorite brother currently lives. Both towns have some complicated histories with slavery. Frankly, most of North Missouri does. For all of the talk of the southern half of the state being the “Little Dixie” part of Missouri, things weren’t that much different up close to the Iowa border. I heard stories growing up and knew the tales of Mark Twain. What might have once been a scandal to the fine folk of Missouri is now embraced as part of our culture! Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn evoke proud nostalgia for a past full of boyhood pranks and adventures. Hannibal has practically built an entire tourist industry off of it. What no one talks about, however, is the very dark face of what built those stories and that heritage they now embrace so fervently. And yes, I mean that in both senses of the word. James, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Percival Everett, dives into that darkness and says the quiet part out loud. It is so much more than a retelling of Twain’s classic story from the perspective of the slave, Jim, it is both a picaresque novel in its own right, while at the same time serving as a loud critique not only of its source material, but how we conveniently ignore the stories of the suffering and indignation of those around us because we don’t focus on them. When the light is turned on, we see a whole different world, revealing that how we think the world works is not how it works at all. Jim is a slave, owned by Miss Watson, one of the guardians for young Huckleberry Finn. His survival depends on his ability to act and present himself to the white world as just what they expect him to be. He speaks in broken, vernacular English, he affects a supernatural fear of the world, and pretends he is an ignorant black slave, unthreatening and harmless. It is an affectation Jim and his fellow slaves put on to survive, knowing that if they ever break it, their white masters will see it as a threat, and it could mean their lives. Yet, when he arrives in the safety of his home with his wife and daughter, Jim code-switches to speak with them in standard English, displaying that far from being ignorant, he is a cultured, well-spoken, well-read man, who looks to philosophy to give him some sort of answer for the reasons why the world is the way it is, only to find that the philosophy of the educated white man is empty and meaningless for a man who has always been enslaved. It is when Sadie overhears that Miss Watson is contemplating selling Jim that his world is shattered, and he decides to flee in the hopes of escaping his enslavement and maybe, just maybe, getting his wife and daughter out. It is while he is on the run that he happens upon Huck, who is himself escaping Miss Watson, though for very different reasons. Huck is himself also attempting to understand the world and why it is the way it is, especially for slaves, and looks to Jim for answers. This forces Jim to further contemplate the nature of identity and power and how those with the power chip away at the identities of those they subjugate to keep their stranglehold on them. As Jim and Huck venture down the Mississippi, their adventures reveal more and more of the nature of what it means to be black and what it means to be white in the world. As Jim comes into his own, Huck, too, has to accept hard truths, as Jim urges the young boy to make free choices and to see himself as a free man. It is with this in mind that James now claims his own identity, no longer fearing or being bound by the shackles of white expectations, but claiming himself and his family as his right. Everett’s retelling of what has been called the “great American story” is daring, and it lives up to the audacity of even trying. Far from the caricature of a slave that is the Jim of Twain’s novel, James is a full-fleshed out man, who has claimed what human dignity he could he a world that expects him to behave differently. He’s educated himself and his community, he has a family, and a mysterious past that is only barely explained in the ending, one that makes him so tantalizingly relatable and…well, human. And this is the key to the heart of the story. Of course, James is human, but under the systems of racism and slavery in America, Jim was not. This leads to the performative existence, this split identity (or dual consciousness, if you will), between the true self and the self of the colonizer, this dance between who I feel I am and who they expect me to be. As James makes his way down the Mississippi with Huck, that identity only becomes more complicated, as he sees the experiences of other enslaved people, and their dehumanization, and how the systems are rigged to continue that dehumanization, no matter who is at the wheel. Freedom is not an identity that can be given to James; he has to take it and claim it, to make a choice to be free. Media of late has decried several anti-slavery television shows and films exploring slavery, reveling in the horror of it for the shock value, overriding the very real message they say they are trying to express. Everett does not stoop to this level. James’s experiences feel truthful; he is seeing the everyday slights, humiliations, and tortures of so many other slaves for no other reason than being black, and thus, property, not truly human. Even those few people who claim they are “enlightened” and forward-thinking are not to be trusted. The minute their superiority as whites is questioned, the punishment comes. This dance for James underscores the African American experience in America, the inability they have always had to just be completely themselves, as whole people, accepted for who and what they are, because that existence is seen as threatening to the whites who hold the reins of power. For all of the darkness of slavery that James explores, the story also has its humor and its powerful insight. Huck’s childish observations are still as amusing in Everett’s expert hands as they were in Twain's (Everett is himself a very funny raconteur), and provide a lighter grounding in the world. As a child, Huck explores these harder truths with the wide-eyed innocence of youth, even as he struggles to make sense of the senseless. James himself is not without a sense of sardonic humor, particularly in his observations of irony, satire, and the puffed-up vanity of the so-called “better” whites, notably Judge Thatcher. His conversations with the likes of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau are both cheeky and philosophical, most notably, Voltaire, whose novel, Candide, clearly influenced how Everett shaped this book. James argues vociferously with each in his dreams and hallucinations, noting that each of these men was born white and free. How could they possibly understand what it is to feel the lash or know inhumanity? His most pointed argument is with Voltaire directly, a man who spoke of the freedom of men, and yet believed in a racial hierarchy. These sequences not only allow us to see James’s inner philosophical life, but they let us see his wit and intellect, especially as we see him making his points. Even with Cunégonde’s warning ringing in his ears, knowing that the system is rigged against him ever being completely free, James makes free choices as a completely actualized man, who chooses who he wants to be and no longer allows for others to define who he is - not his enslavers, not white society, and not Mark Twain, either. If the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story of poor, white childhood, James is its grown-up counterpart, the half of the story that Huck, in all of his childish, self-centered naivete, could not see. It is a nimble, funny, powerful exploration of what the other half of that great American novel was all about, the untold story of the man who was created to play before a polite, white audience. Jim was a mere caricature in Huck’s story. James is a fully realized man, one who has a voice and a mind, for all that the structures of whiteness and power have tried to strip him of it. While he will always be black, he no longer has to play at being what society tells him he is. He can now make the free choice to be himself.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2025 by J. K. Wolfe
Format: Hardcover
What an exceptional idea. This novel is a (sort of) retelling of Huck Finn, but from Jim's perspective. The reason I say 'sort of' is because you will recognize some characters and moments from Huck Finn, but there are also some major deviations. There is also one incredible plot twist, and while I don't want to ruin it, I will say it's why I gave it four stars instead of five...I feel like the plot twist wasn't really complete in some way. I wanted/needed more. In this telling, Jim is such an interesting character...one who both fights against the system to which he's been born, and succumbs to its cruelty in some ways. He is both brilliant and biting and contradictory in so many ways. Jim yearns to be James, the more complete version of himself...but how do you achieve that without agency? There are moments of dark humor, tenderness, rage, and confusion. Ultimately, James is a portrait of a man trying to be a man, when his environment sees him as less than human. In some ways I am reminded of Frankenstein's creature and a question of that book: can someone be good when treated so monstrously?
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Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2025 by T Schoen