Category: Fiction Reviews

James, by Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s novel, James, which recently won the 2025 Pulitzer for fiction, is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckelberry Finn told through the sensibility of the slave Jim.

Everett introduces the story with pages from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a 19th Century composer who formed the first black minstrel troupe. Some of these songs, like “Old Dan Tucker” and “Turkey in the Straw,” were disconcertingly familiar to our group because we had learned them as children and sang them with innocent ignorance.

Everett rips away that band-aid of ignorance with Jim’s opening reflection:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day . . . Lighting bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door . . . Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the end of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.

Waiting for someone to get raped or beaten or burned alive or sold away from their family.

The little bastards, of course, are Huck and Tom conspiring to play some kind of demeaning joke on Jim the slave, a grown man who understands he must show white folks what they need to see: a docile darky, happy under the massa’s thumb. So Jim obligingly calls out to Huck and Tom, “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?” and introduces the fascinating construct that builds the irony that drives the story: the slaves are not the dumb, insensitive, superstitious, sub-human creatures the white folks need them to be. Among themselves, they speak in cultured voices with rich vocabularies, read the great thinkers, and parse the subtle difference between dramatic and proleptic irony. In the slave quarters, they drill the children in situational translations. How, for instance, to tell a white lady her house is on fire. Not by yelling, “Fire, fire!” because that is too direct, but by exclaiming, “Lawdy, missum, looky dere!” because whites must be the ones to name the trouble.

Miss Watson soon names the trouble that launches the story when she is overheard declaring her intention to sell Jim away from his wife and daughter, and Jim decides he must run—though he knows the horror of what can happen to a runaway slave. At the same time, Huck stages his own murder and runs to avoid the blows of his abusive father. When the Jim and Huck coincidentally end up together on Jackson Island, their river adventure begins. Sometimes they are together, and sometimes they are separated. They are always growing in their understanding of the world and their places in it, in their understanding of their connection to each other. They grapple with what it means to be black or white or slave or free.

The story is narrated by Jim in his “real” voice, and the tension from the irony of who this person really is, versus who white people believe he is, builds an intimacy with the reader that makes the pages fly by, sometimes showing foolishness, sometimes tenderness, sometimes the omnipresent violence of a slave’s world. Rape so common it’s almost banal, a slave hanged for stealing a pencil, a slave burned alive, a wife and young daughter sold to a slave breeding farm.

At the beginning of this gripping story, Jim is understandably reactive and runs away from the threat of being sold. But as the story develops, he becomes determinedly proactive. This turning occurs at the midpoint when he is caught up in Daniel Emmett’s racist minstrel show. He is sold as a slave, bought as a tenor. He becomes a black man who must be made blacker with shoe polish so people will believe he is white.

The wrenching irony of all this finally twists Jim from reactor into protagonist. He steals the journal with Daniel Emmett’s songs and the beautiful blank pages beyond them and runs like only a slave can run: this time, toward his wife and child to somehow save them. Eventually getting a pencil stub, he begins to write, which becomes a metaphor for his emerging fully into his own and daring to reveal his true self to the white world on the final page of a truly brilliant novel.

“Are any of you named Nigger Jim?”
I pointed to each of us.
“Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”
“And who are you?”
“I am James.
“James what?”
“Just James.”

Before James became the book everybody was reading and raving about, few of the people in our group were familiar with Percival Everett’s work. Now we are eager to read more.

— Sharelle Moranville

How to Read a Book, by Monica Wood

The cover of Monica Wood’s How to Read a Book is warm and inviting, especially to a lover of books and reading. It shows the exterior of a cozy bookstore from the sidewalk, beckoning readers to come on in. What follows is a highly engaging and uplifting story full of quirky and complex characters, difficult situations, emotional highs and lows, growth and redemption, and resilience. Is there a bookstore in the novel? Yes – but there’s so much more! 

There’s Harriett, a.k.a. “Bookie,” who runs a book club inside a women’s prison in Maine. She is dedicated to sharing the power of literature with every member of the group, helping them know their worth and express their feelings as they read aloud, react, discuss, write, and make connections to themselves and others. Wood does not sugar-coat their voices as they express powerlessness, rage, longing, resentment, distrust, love and more. We get to know each member of the group as they support one another through a very meager existence.  

But if the cover of the book showed a prison, it would not suggest that one of the youngest inmates, 22-year-old-Violet, is suddenly freed at the beginning of the book. In fact, the bulk of the story is arguably hers as she tries to navigate life as an ex-con “on the outs” where she never had a chance to live independently before being locked up. We watch as she goes from a tense reunion with her sister to a chance meeting with Harriett (at the bookstore!) and another fraught reunion with Frank, the husband of the woman she killed in the drunk driving accident that landed her in prison. Through much effort she lands a job for which she has “affinity,” a word that provides fledgling self-esteem, documenting research on talking parrots in a university lab – where the birds themselves are characters, as well as her ill-tempered, manipulative boss. 

Perhaps a bird would have made a good cover image, since the birds, too, were captives. And in addition to Violet’s work with the birds, the inmates give a gift of a small, knitted bird to Harriett as a token of their appreciation. She keeps it, though she’s been warned not to accept anything from them, and not without consequence. This repetition of birds seems symbolic, and yet a bird on the cover wouldn’t adequately represent Frank, a third major character who longs for a relationship with Harriett while feeling terrible about his true feelings around the death of his wife. No spoilers, but it’s not what you’d think. In addition, we get to see his rocky relationship with his daughter and his brilliance as a retired machinist-turned-handyman….at the bookstore. 

So, maybe the bookstore is the thing that ties everything together and is the best choice for the cover after all. As a member of our group observed, avid readers are drawn to books that have bookstores on the cover, and an avid reader would thoroughly enjoy this book. Also, its marketing had the intended effect. It looked like it would be an easy and enjoyable read, and it was, while still being intricately well-written.

As a bonus, our book club happens to include several people who have spent time volunteering at a women’s prison in Mitchellville, Iowa, as well as providing support to women who have recently been released. While there are some differences between the systems in Iowa and Maine, and it’s clear that some details were added to advance the story (such as Violet being outfitted with a fully stocked apartment upon her release – a lucky break that is very unlikely in reality), their general take was that the overall tone of the prison aspect of this book was spot-on. If any Iowa area readers are so inspired, check out Women at the Well for ways to get involved with helping women who are incarcerated and recently released.  

We were glad to have found and read this book, and glad that it left us feeling hopeful. It was also a good reminder of this: 

“The line between this and that, you and her, us and them. The line is thin.” 

— Julie Feirer

The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

Readers in search of good historical fiction may question whether they really want to learn about the everyday life and challenges of Jewish immigrants in London in the 17th century, but The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish quickly draws the reader into a compelling, atmospheric and skillfully written account of the period surrounding the Great Plague of 1665 alongside its impact and meaning to the professional and personal lives of two historical researchers in the 21st century.

In The Weight of Ink, the story moves back and forth, chapter by chapter, between the late 1660s and modern day London – between the household of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes who has followed his flock from Amsterdam, now, after Cromwell’s abdication, a somewhat more accepting place for Jews to practice their religion, and Helen Watt, professor and historical researcher who, at the end of her university career, is battling Parkinson’s disease and her brash, American assistant Aaron Levy.

Rabbi HaCoen Mendes is a survivor of the Inquisition, who was blinded as a concession for renouncing his faith, otherwise to die in agony on the rack. Also in the HaCoen Mendes household is Ester Valazquez, an Amsterdam orphan. She has a brilliant, open and inquisitive mind along with a strong aversion to the arid state of marriage.  Ester becomes the rabbi’s scribe by default, since she had been educated alongside her brothers, despite cultural norms against it. This work frees her from household drudgery, the only culturally acceptable alternative to marriage for a young woman.

Helen is a brilliant researcher and seemingly revered teacher, but she is lonely and emotionally repressed, having retreated from her first and only love and “…wasted her life fleeing from it ” (p. 452).  Aaron is obnoxious, arrogant and immature, but a highly intelligent graduate student whose dissertation on some minutia of Shakespeare’s Influence has stalled, likely irretrievably.  The personalities of these two accomplished researchers clash again and again until a seemingly terminal confrontation initiated by Aaron clears the air and marks the beginning of an unconventional friendship.   

But the main character of the narrative is a trove of old documents discovered during the 21st century renovation of the former Mendes, now historic HaLevy house. The narrative thereafter shuttles back and forth, chapter by chapter from one century to the other as Helen and Aaron decipher, analyze and puzzle over the documents. In alternate chapters the story of Ester, the originator of many of the documents as the rabbi’s scribe, is gradually revealed in fascinating detail, including vivid descriptions of life in London in the late 17th century.

Description is indeed the author’s strong point. Just one example – not long after Ester’s arrival in London, the rabbi sends her out into the city alone on an errand.  At first terrified by the jostling crowd,–“She was in a crush of English strangers and her breath came quick with fear – but their unfamiliar smells and rough fabrics and stout limbs carried her and the heat of their bodies warmed her” (p. 132) –and she soon comes to recognize a strong desire for life drives existence in London and in her – desire, strong enough to override the cultural conventions constricting her.  Ester’s craving for a life centered on books and ideas and how she addresses this life force through her work as a scribe is a major theme of the narrative and one shrouded in mystery.

Although The Weight of Ink would not be classified as a mystery, it reveals the secrets of the documents in a gradual way that nourishes suspense and propels the reader through the narrative. Two revelations near the end are especially surprising – one involving what momentarily seems like a contradiction of Ester’s desire for a life of the mind and the other that raises, but does not resolve, a mystery about her origins. This final jaw-dropping revelation also offers a profound gift to Aaron.

The book club enjoyed The Weight of Ink, and deemed it well written, especially the vivid descriptions, but the consensus was it would benefit from a thorough editing of its 559 pages.

— Sue Martin