Get The BookBrowse Anthology, our 880 page collection of our past decade of Best of Year reviews, now available in hardcover!

BookBrowse Reviews James by Percival Everett

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

James by Percival Everett

James

A Novel

by Percival Everett
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (17):
  • Readers' Rating (6):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 19, 2024, 320 pages
  • Reviewed by BookBrowse Book Reviewed by:
    Lisa Butts
  • Genres & Themes
  • Publication Information
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


A fresh reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Jim at the narrative wheel.

The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, Erasure (2001), are about whose voices are heard and in what context. In the movie, Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae, both playing authors, argue with their white peers against awarding a literary prize to a novel by a Black author that invokes pernicious racial stereotypes. When Wright and Rae try to explain this, one of the white authors responds, "I just think it's essential to listen to Black voices right now," drowning out the only two Black people in the room.

In James, Everett brings readers the voice of Jim, the enslaved companion of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jim's voice, along with the voices of the other enslaved people he knows and meets on his journey, is one of constant code switching. Chapter 2 opens with Jim teaching a group of enslaved children how to speak in a racialized dialect reminiscent of Twain's novel — "Lawdy, missum! Looky dere." — explaining, "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 a clever detail for creating the world of chattel slavery from the perspectives of the enslaved, and the code switching introduces frequent opportunities for humor (if perhaps a little too frequent). The ignorance-feigning language of minstrelsy also hearkens back to Erasure's book-within-a-book called My Pafology, which is written with a white audience in mind, employing the stereotypical language this audience would expect to hear from a streetwise Black criminal.

Everett covers many of the incidents readers will recall from Huck Finn — most vividly and disturbingly Huck and Jim's encounter with the confidence men calling themselves the King and the Duke. He also includes, of course, many incidents that are not in the original text, which occur during periods in which Jim and Huck are separated. The plot is stuffed with action and it moves quickly, though Everett finds time to show Jim's philosophical side, as he pores over books stolen from Judge Thatcher's library and engages in imaginary dialogue with Voltaire and Rousseau about the morality of enslavement.

Slavery's violence is unflinchingly captured in all of its horror, but also in its absurdity. At one point, Jim and another person fleeing enslavement are shot at by their pursuers. After the fact, Jim's companion expresses astonishment, declaring, "They were shooting at us...You can't work a dead slave. Why would they shoot?" Jim's response is simple: "They hate us, Norman." Slavery is a matter of capital but it's also fundamentally an expression of hate, rage, and dehumanization.

Of course, Twain was a humorist and Huck Finn is, though possibly less so to a modern audience, meant to be comedic in spirit. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of James is that the funniest lines are given to Jim, and humor is a great humanizer. In one scene, Jim tells Huck that he knew his mother, whom Huck doesn't remember. Huck asks Jim if she was pretty, leading to the following exchange:

"I dunno. I reckon. It's a scary thing for a slave to think such things."
"Why is that?"
"Jest the way the world is."
"You think this here river is pretty?" Huck asked.
"I reckon I do," I said.
"Then why you cain't say if my mama was pretty?"
"River ain't a white woman."

Like the author supposedly standing up for Black voices in American Fiction, there are white savior types in James held up for satirical ridicule. While separated from Huck, Jim is purchased away from an enslaver by a group of a cappella singers who claim to be anti-slavery. He is ostensibly "free" while among them, but when he discovers they still intend to exploit his labor for profit and care little for his safety around those who would do him harm, he flees. It is clear that without true liberation, sympathetic words from white people are nothing but empty platitudes, or worse, veils that obscure a violence less naked but equally harmful for its insidiousness.

Readers of some of Everett's other work may find themselves yearning for the stranger qualities of books like Erasure and Dr. No. James is a straightforward novel with few frills. However, it features some excellent surprises and the build up to and execution of the final act are expertly done. Everett captures the milieu of slavery at the start of the Civil War with precision and depth and frees his protagonist from the bonds of offensive caricature.

Reviewed by Lisa Butts

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2024, and has been updated for the December 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked James, try these:

  • Fagin the Thief jacket

    Fagin the Thief

    by Allison Epstein

    Published 2025

    About This book

    A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London's most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue.

  • Let Us Descend jacket

    Let Us Descend

    by Jesmyn Ward

    Published 2024

    About This book

    More by this author

    From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

We have 4 read-alikes for James, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Percival Everett
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    Real Americans
    by Rachel Khong
    From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

  • Book Jacket

    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

  • Book Jacket

    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

Who Said...

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J of A T, M of N

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.