James

Everett's retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective works because it refuses to simply invert Twain's moral framework — it gives its narrator a private language, a coded literacy, and an interior life Twain never granted him, then lets that gap between what James shows white characters and what he actually thinks become the novel's engine. Critics who praised the book kept circling back to how the humor and horror sit in the same sentence without canceling each other out. It's a virtuosic act of ventriloquism that never feels like a stunt, converting a 19th-century American touchstone into something that reads as urgent rather than reverent.