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Arrives
Nov 9 – Nov 13
At a glance
- Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Dimensions
- 5.82 x 1.11 x 8.52 in
- Weight
- 1.2 lb
- Publisher
- Doubleday
- Publication date
- March 19, 2024
- Edition
- First Edition
- Language
- English
Description
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
Specs 9
| 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 | 5.82 x 1.11 x 8.52 inches |
No specs match.
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Top Amazon Reviews
Action and beauty
Stunning story from the perspective of Jim that was a roller coaster of adventure, and a much needed mind shift and education on slavery that really moved me. Definitely a must read for anyone!
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2026 by JulzRulz
A surpassing retelling of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective
Format: Hardcover
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from the perspective of the enslaved person in the story, Jim? Percival Everett imagines just that scenario as he retells this classic in the first person. He does so with flare, and his product gripped me until the very last pages. This transformed account of Jim – also known as James – makes the story less about the dominant white society’s nagged conscious about racial injustice. Instead, Everett’s narrative becomes one of self-determination and self-actualization by granting Jim agency. Jim knows how to read and write. Curious about literature like Voltaire’s Candide, he becomes not only philosophical but also self-aware. He becomes the intelligent master of his own life in a society that couldn’t care less about people like him, despite the Civil War. As a privileged white man, I draw personal courage from this tale of Everett’s Jim. Honestly, I lack the resourcefulness that Jim has throughout this account and admire his determination. I also learn to empathize with the adversity that many African Americans still tragically face. Twain’s storytelling might lie behind Everett’s plot, but the modern black experience also informs the verbiage. Particularly strong are Jim’s relatable sentiments towards his family, represented by countless letters of former enslaved persons seeking family members. With Everett’s recast, he becomes by far the most human actor in the book. I’m not sure I’ll ever see this book taught in a high school classroom in my lifetime in my Tennessee home. Themes of racial justice and even revolution still threaten too many white interests. Nonetheless, this book should reach a broad audience, exemplified by its Pulitzer nomination. It conveys essential truths about how we humans still too easily exploit each other and about how people of any skin color don’t always fit our preconceptions. It creatively demonstrates how skin color can be one of the dumbest ways of categorizing a person’s social contribution. If you’re looking for something that’ll teach you about lingering racial injustice in a story format, this book might be written just for you!
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Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson
A Thematically Rich, Plot-Forward Retelling Of An American Classic
Format: Hardcover
Jim is a slave in Hannibal, Missouri. He is owned by Miss Watson, who also serves as a guardian to young Huckleberry Finn, a local errant youth. When Jim learns that she intends to sell him, he runs away to a small island in the Mississippi River, intending to return shortly for his family so they can all escape together. Instead, the next morning, he discovers Huck on the island, having faked his own death after his violent, alcoholic father attacked him. Realizing that it will be assumed that he killed Huck and fled, the two head off on the river so that Jim can escape to freedom in the north and regroup. Their path does not go smoothly. They have a series of “adventures”, though perhaps travails would be a more accurate word. Jim finds himself separated from Huck, sold twice over, escaping for his life once again. He’s reunited with Huck and the two return to Hannibal to try to free Jim’s family, but discover that their journey is not yet over. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, but it was definitely in the second semester of my senior year, which means I was not like, especially attentive to it. I mostly remember not really liking it. I do remember that I found the portrayal of Jim very uncomfortable, even as someone who grew up in an area where the racial politics were not great. The idea of a book that retold the story from his perspective, giving him dignity and agency, was very appealing, and of course this book has won or been shortlisted for many, many prizes. So my expectations were very high, but ultimately this was a book I found more admirable than one I actually connected with. It does a reasonable job with character development, but it’s much more focused on its sometimes-frenetic plot than it is on its characters. Which meant for me that a crucial late-plot revelation didn’t quite land. It didn’t feel like it got the room to develop, or breathe. But even more than plot, this is a book that wants the reader to pay attention to its themes, particularly around the construction of identity. In Percival Everett’s telling, the reason that Jim speaks in stereotyped, offensive dialect is that slaves have developed that method of speech to hide their real voices from whites, to protect themselves by allowing whites to feel superior. There are at least two characters who pass, one knowingly and one unknowingly. Jim at one point joins a company of minstrel singers, where his comparatively light complexion is made up to fit the caricature the audience expects to see. And, of course, when Jim does achieve his freedom at the end (in a different way than he does in Mark Twain’s original), he claims his full name. Given the opportunity to decide what he wants to be called, it’s “James”. We are who others see to some extent, but we are also who we decide to be. So while I was disappointed that I found it hard to get really engaged with, it’s a rich, well-told story that mines new depths of meaning out of a familiar tale. It won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, it’s very good and I would happily recommend it to anyone (especially those who love plot-forward books).
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Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2026 by Gabby M
Great Read
Format: Hardcover
I love the beginning to the very end of this book. I was so happy to be able to have the means to purchase this book and enjoyed it, it taught me so much of things I forgot that accrued back then. I’m so grateful for my being now in time because I couldn’t have gone through this much pain in that time of this book. Awesome book 📕
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Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2026 by Makeupbyluckiestar48
The book that Percival Everett was born to write
Format: Hardcover
Percival Everett reimagines—no, inverts-- the classic saga of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that resides in every American’s consciousness. Huck Finn and enslaved Jim’s adventures have been in print for 140 years. If you didn’t read it in American schools, you’ve likely still been affected by its content. Everett reappropriates that story, turns it upside down and inside out, and leans formidably forward by making this a story and POV of Jim, with Huck at his side. I am in awe and in thorough admiration of Percival Everett’s skills and fierce talent. My personal favorites, The Trees (shortlisted for Booker in 2022), and Telephone (a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2021) combine laconic protagonists, subversive wit, and tragic events. In James, he has made Twain’s classic his own historical fiction, and I applaud it as the contemporary bookend of Twain’s classic. He improves upon it by giving Jim agency. I predict that they will be teaching both books side by side in the coming years. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them…The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.” This is Jim, teaching his daughter and other enslaved children a lesson in coded speech. Although they speak eloquently amongst themselves, they communicate submissively to the white folks, which enhances their survival in a world where they are nothing but chattel. It also illuminates their intelligence as they hide (linguistically) in broad daylight from their ignorant “massas.” Additionally, the enslaved people pretend that God and Jesus are primary in their lives, when in actuality, as Jim states, regarding white folks, “religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” If there really was a God and a Jesus, why would they allow white people to enslave Black people? Is this the kind of world that any God intended? As in Twain’s original, Jim and Huck run off together from Hannibal, Missouri and ride the Mississippi River, beginning in a raft. The main plotline of the original text is captured, but comically and dramatically turned on its head. Jim leads a double life—one that he owns, and one that meets white people’s expectations. In fact, there are those that are more threatened by a Black man with eloquence than they are by a Black man with a pistol. Intelligence is Jim’s stunning subterfuge. He has a rich interior life, and in dreams, he debates slavery and philosophy with the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke. As an autodidact who enriched himself in Judge Thatcher’s library, Jim spends stealth nights in there poring over the judge’s books. His quick wit, thoughtful compassion, and deep humanity also become his ammunition in a hostile world. As the plot progresses, Jim and Huck grow closer, and more revelations are gradually disclosed. The major twist is foreshadowed early on, so it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and it changes the complexion of the story. As others have already noted, this is the novel that Everett was born to write. In his hands, his heart.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2024 by switterbug/Betsey Van Horn
I give this a grade of SUPERB!
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
Just James
Format: Kindle
I was never the kid in high school that was compliant with school readings so I never read the story or Huckleberry Finn. I don’t know if that would have given me better insight or another perspective to this story or not. But I did throughly enjoy this story. As someone who is wanting to read more historical fiction, this is a good beginning. They underestimated how smart Jim really was and that was their downfall. This story kept me engaged the whole time- there was never a slow part. I enjoyed it and would recommend.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2026 by Taryn Grifith
Jim was the Character. James is the Man.
Format: Kindle
I was never particularly attached to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer. It has also been many years since I read them, so I didn’t come into James with any great reverence for the original story. Maybe that made this even more fascinating. We know Jim. Or at least, we think we do. But James asks what happens when the man we have always viewed through someone else’s eyes is finally allowed to tell us who he actually is. The Jim we remember can easily be reduced to someone simple or ignorant. Everett’s James is anything but. He is intelligent, thoughtful, observant, literate, strategic, angry, loving, and completely aware of the absurdity and brutality of the world around him. His ignorance is a performance. And that may have been the most powerful part of the book for me. James understands that showing his intelligence is dangerous. In a society built upon the belief that Black people are inherently inferior, appearing too intelligent threatens the entire structure. So he changes his language. He makes himself smaller. He becomes the version of a Black man that white people expect, and need him to be in order to survive. There is something horrifying about realizing how much intelligence, personality, anger, humor and humanity has to remain hidden simply because revealing it could get him killed. I was completely fine with Everett eventually departing more significantly from Twain’s story. In fact, I think it was necessary. This isn’t supposed to simply be Huckleberry Finn with a different narrator. James deserves a story that isn’t entirely dependent upon Huck’s. And maybe that’s ultimately what I loved most about this book. Giving Jim a voice allows him to reclaim both story and history. He is no longer simply a Black character existing within a white man’s adventure. He becomes James—a man with his own thoughts, motivations, relationships, fears, rage and choices. He gets agency. He gets complexity. He gets to be the center of his own story. Most importantly, he gets to tell it himself. An incredibly smart, powerful reimagining. Five stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2026 by Casey Rodweller