CBR16 Bingo: Fanfic – This book is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which centers the viewpoint of the runaway slave Jim who accompanied Huck on his travels on the Mississippi.
Jim is well-known as Huckleberry Finn’s runaway slave companion, but in this retelling we meet him as James, a character for who the stakes are higher and the world much more vicious than we ever glimpse in Mark Twain’s classic novel.
It’s been a long while since I last read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I remember the beats of the plot and the character of Jim quite well. There’s some classic novels for which retellings are a dime a dozen (*cough cough* Pride and Prejudice), but I’d never heard of one before for this book before, and I was excited to dive in.
It was fascinating how familiar yet dissimilar the setting is right off the bat, seeing all the familiar places and situations in a new light. The writing is dryly, sometimes horrifyingly funny. Everett adroitly plunges us straight into the crushing psychological and physical torment that James and his fellow slaves live under every moment of their lives, as well as the little ways they could try to reclaim ownership over themselves. When things go completely off the rails, you almost want to cheer.
However, I did wish that we got more depth in the relationships between characters – James and Huck, his family, Norman, to state a few, all figure massively in his life and his story, but for some reason it felt like we only got a surface level sort of look into them. Without that added layer, I was unexpectedly left a little cold.