Percival Everett's "James" does something that shouldn't be possible: it takes one of the most debated novels in American literature and makes it feel entirely new. This retelling of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim (here called James) is a masterwork of voice, wit, and controlled fury.
Everett's James is no passive companion. He's a philosopher, a strategist, and a man performing a version of himself that white society expects. The novel's central conceit, that enslaved people speak in dialect only around white people and switch to eloquent, educated speech among themselves, is both funny and devastating.
The Mississippi River scenes crackle with tension. Every encounter with white characters carries the weight of survival. Everett handles Twain's problematic legacy with precision, neither sanitizing the original nor letting it off the hook.
The writing is lean, propulsive, and deceptively simple. Short chapters pull you forward. Moments of genuine comedy sit alongside passages of horror. This is the kind of novel that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about a canonical text.
A masterpiece. One of the best novels of the decade so far.