JadotJeanneDeux

And the Pulitzer Prize winner of 2025.

I ordered this book a few months ago. When I saw it was a continuation of The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of new of Jim, a character I completely loved, I was very excited to read it. As I sometimes do with things I really want to enjoy, I put it off, not wanting to fall asleep on it out of exhaustion, and so, I haven’t read it yet. And, just this week, I did something I never do about a book I want to read–I jumped to a website that told the entire plot. Now, this book has gotten glowing reviews, with a few major awards. Sometimes, I’m still naive enough to believe a Pulitzer is really going to mean something but I forget the times are in now, and when I delve into it, usually come away disappointed. So, Spoiler Alert, as they say on IMdB, here’s the plot as I read it.

Jim, or James, is still a slave, Huck Finn’s brutal drunken father has been murdered, and the two do escape down the Mississippi on a raft. But, James, who is married with children, is not a character inside described or created by Twain. He is very sharp, and only puts on the patois dialect of slaves back then to deceive the white man, when in actuality, he converses with his wife and children in a most erudite manner. As a slave who knows the cruelty of the institution of slavery and has felt the lash, he plays the good ole’ slave only to keep the white man off track. Somehow, he has become very educated and read books in his master’s library. There’s a point made that he never takes credit for all the brilliant problem solving solutions he comes up with but gives all the credit to the white man to void trouble and repercussions. As I said, he and Huck escape down the river, and it is still believed that Huck is dead and now because he’s escaped, James is the prime suspect in Huck’s demise. In Twains’ version, Huck played a joke on Jim by putting a dead rattlesnake in his sleeping gear, not realizing that a snake’s mate always returns for him, and the snake’s mate bites Jim. In this version, James is definitely bitten by a rattlesnake and goes into a fever dream where he and Voltaire debate the cruelty of the institution of slavery. James is quite the Renaissance Man. Somehow, Chapter 19 in Twain’s Huck Finn, probably my favorite and the most beautiful chapter in the book, has been down turned and reversed, rightfully so in the eyes of some critics because, and this must have slipped by me, Twain’s version gloried slavery and James in the new book shreds it to tatters. Lots of adventures ensue, including James saving a slave girl from rape, who is ultimately executed anyway, lots of brutality, suffering, he and Huck are separated until a ship’s boiler blows up while James is on the river and Huck is on the ship that exploded. The book culminates with James admitting to Huck that he is really Huck’s natural father, incites an insurrection, and escapes to Iowa with his wife and child to be know forever as James.

I won’t make any comment on the story and let you draw your own conclusions.