Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.

For my Sunday Salon post this week, I’m posting my review of James by Percival Everett. I lead our book group’s discussion on Thursday night, with a big boost from Deb at ReaderBuzz who shared her book club kit with me.

Book: James by Percival Everett
Genre: Historical fiction
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: 2024

Source: Audiobook borrowed from library and print book purchased from a local bookstore

Summary: James reimagines the story of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the point of view of Jim. James is an enslaved man living in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri.

James hides his intelligence and teaches the children in his community to do the same. Twain famously boasted about his use of dialect in his stories. Everett plays with that idea. In James, the black people speak in an elevated form of standard English among themselves but codeswitch to a dialect when speaking to white people. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.”

His unwanted adventure begins when he hears that Miss Watson intends to sell him to a man in New Orleans. Rather than be forced away from his wife and daughter, James swims to an island in the Mississippi River where he encounters Huck who faked his own death before running away. That puts James in an awful predicament. He can expect to be pursued both for running and for killing a boy.

James won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Thoughts: James was the August selection for our book group that specializes in race in America. We have been meeting since 2008 and this is the 160th book we read together. There was a great turn-out last night (unusual for August) and we had a terrific discussion!

There’s a story told early in the book about a lynching in St. Louis. Many readers probably assume this is fiction, but it’s not. I wrote about the incident after a tour I took in the spring. We stopped at Seventh and Chestnut streets to stand on the site where Francis McIntosh was killed and where people are working to memorialize the travesty of justice that occurred there.

I grew up thirty miles south of Hannibal. Hannibal has grown to a small city with excellent facilities to accommodate tourists. My small hometown feels like Hannibal was in Twain’s day. I rode alongside the Mississippi River every day to get into town.

My copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was purchased at the Becky Thatcher bookstore, still housed in what was once Laura Hawkins house. I read it when I was about 12. After that, every time I saw the Mississippi, I imagined myself on a raft, escaping down the river to have adventures in the wider world.

There is so much to love about this book. My favorite thing, though, was that it let me re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with Everett’s version of James in my brain.

Appeal: Our book group enjoyed James. I think anyone who appreciates good story-telling, clever narration, and beautiful writing will like it, too.