Category: Reviews by Sharelle Moranville

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 19^th 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

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters begins with “Once upon a time . . .” So we know to expect larger than life characters, clashes of good and evil, and a happily-ever-after ending. Yet The Waters is also a rural noir story, which means, in the author’s own words, it’s going to be “muddy and bloody,” with muck rattlers and rape, with the moral ambiguity of Wild Will Zook. And disgruntled men with lots of guns.

The story carries many themes: our relationship to the land and animals, religion versus spirituality, the meaning of family, math and logic versus intuition, aging, motherhood, reproductive rights, modern medicine versus folk medicine. But what drives the narrative is the division in the community. The men of Whiteheart are angry and discontent with Hermine (aka Herself), the matriarch of M’sauga Island, where no men are allowed and women do what they please. These men are suffering with problematic feet, bad backs, dark moods, and love problems. And Herself isn’t coming through with the cures the way she used to.

The men are troubled, sure their glory days are over. Once Whiteheart claimed its name from the delicate white-hearted celery grown by the effort of the whole community working harmoniously together. Now the land is row cropped and most of it is owned by the Clay family whose men are shadowed by hemophilia. Wild Will Zook has been banished. Wives are talking back, kids are disappointments, and Reverend Roy keeps telling them that to be a man is to suffer. Because they feel so beat down, they start shooting at stuff (animals, trees, machinery, M’sauga Island, Herself). In a memorable scene, they fell a beautiful old willow tree in an orgy of chain sawing—all the time keeping up an annoying Greek-chorus like commentary (aka whining) about the state of their world.

The only relief they get is when Rose Thorn (Herself’s youngest daughter) returns home, usually in the Spring. Rose Thorn doesn’t do anything to make them feel better because she’s a lazy woman. Yet, inevitably, when she’s around she can somehow “spin straw into gold and make people more interested in what might happen next.”

We meet Rose Thorn for the first time when the men discover her walking down the road, bedraggled and bleeding, secretly carrying a frail newborn in her backpack. The effect on the men is instant. They become considerate and loving. Interested. Hopeful.

The newborn in the backpack is Donkey, a child of rape, who comes of age in the story. On the island, she sleeps with either her grandmother or mother, sharing their dreams. She loves the swamp and the two donkeys just across the bridge. She crawls on her belly to meet the big m’sauga snake who she believes to be her sister. She turns to math and logic to try to understand a confusing world.

She is curious about the men and boys of Whiteheart and often slips away to observe them from behind the faded curtains of the house Wild Will built for Herself. But most of all, Donkey so wants Titus (who loves Rose Thorn passionately) to be her dad.

Titus, heir to the biggest farm in Whiteheart, has great passion for Rose Thorn, but he also loves practical, competent, Catholic, fertile Lorena, who can cut a pie into five perfectly even pieces (a source of wonderment to Donkey).

The climactic scene in the story, where the division in the community is finally resolved, is when the Greek chorus guys help Rose Thorn deliver her baby—Rose Moon, Titus’s child. This scene is hectic, funny, slapstick and very tender. When Titus finally shows up to carry Rose Thorn across the bridge, he is about to be bitten by the big m’sauga when Donkey tries to intervene and the snake bites her. And Herself falls in the water, only to be saved by Two Inch Tony.

As everyone is finally on the way to the hospital in Whiteheart, Donkey reflects on their dilemma.

If the Zook women continued living mysterious lives separate from the town, the men would continue watching them like prey from Boneset and making up stories about them, good and bad, calling them witches and angels. Burning fires and pissing Rosie into the snow. Standish might not shoot at them again, but someone else would; there was no end of men with guns.

So they abandon the island. Rose Thorn seeks medical care for her breast cancer, and eventually the women, Donkey, and baby Rose Moon move into Wild Will’s house. They accept the delicacies he leaves at the door, but they do not invite him in. He has become a kind of good ghost. He realizes that taking care of Rose Thorn in her pregnancy has “finally made a woman out of him, which is to say it has made him a better man.”

Titus has his epiphany too, when, having trapped and planned to kill the m’sauga, he instead submits to it and listens to the voice of God, which is not a man’s voice, telling him to take care of his kids.

Campbell’s writing is so marvelously detailed and specific that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world of the waters. And because she uses an omniscient narrative voice, we can know everything about everybody—even what the crows think of all the human messing around down below.

Campbell invites us to roll our eyes, be creeped out, laugh, think about, but not judge, the world of the waters. And perhaps that’s the fairy dust sprinkled on Rose Thorn that lets her lift people’s spirits. She doesn’t judge them. Our group hadn’t read rural noir before, and it times it felt like a bit much, but that didn’t deter us from lively discussions.

— Sharelle Moranville

Kathi Appelt’s novel The Underneath (with illustrations by David Small) is a beautifully told story about pretty much everything all the time: life, death, love, hate, forgiveness, jealousy, generosity, cruelty, loyalty, betrayal, hope . . .

When the story opens, a mama cat and her two tiny, not-yet named kittens are in a bad way.

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned at the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.

But mama cat soon finds a lonely, chained-up old hound, Ranger, who offers them hospitality in the “dark and holy Underneath,” where he is safe from the beatings of Gar Face. The cat family is safe there too. Cozy, even. Ranger names his kittens, immediately choosing Sabine (for the Sabine River) for the girl. And tentatively choosing Possum for the boy, then changing it to Puck when the boy, who has lots of puck, protests. Ranger sings his kittens to sleep every night. And Appelt’s lyrical writing makes us feel the preciousness of the odd little “found” family of cats and a dog.

But as in all good stories, something must go wrong. And because it’s in his nature, Puck leaves the safety of the dark and holy Underneath, and the scary, harrowing adventure begins: mama cat is drowned and Puck is left muddy, lost, and miserable on the wrong side of the river.

He isn’t alone on his journey back to Sabine and Ranger, which he had promised his mother. He walks with thousands of years of history, with old grudges and loves and wrongs and betrayals and friendships and alliances of the shape shifters and Grandmother Moccasin and the hundred-foot-long Alligator King. And, of course, Gar Face, the brutal man who is ultimately, and very appropriately, eaten by Alligator King at the end.

Appelt creates this narrative tapestry of trees and rivers and denizens of the bayou who bring thousands of years of love and loss and opinions and passions into Puck’s journey to find Ranger and Sabine. The outcome of the story rests not only on the bravery and love of Ranger and the kittens, but on the very personal choice Grandmother Moccasin makes after a thousand years of raging in a big clay pot, tangled in the roots of an ancient loblolly pine.

When she is finally freed, will Grandmother choose hate (and everybody dies) or love (and almost everybody lives)? Appelt keeps the reader wondering until the very last moment when Grandmother finally chooses love and frees Ranger from his rusty chain. And even that satisfying resolution is not really the end.

For trees, stories never end, they simply fold one into another. Where one begins to close, another begins to open, so that none are ever finished, not really. For Puck and Sabine and Ranger, this old story was the beginning of their new one.

                                                                        . . .

If you could ask the trees about them, the sweet gums and tupelos, the sycamore and oaks, oh, if only you cold decipher the dialects of tallow and chestnut and alder, they would tell you that here, in this lost piney woods, this forest that sits between the highways on the border of Texas and Louisiana, here among the deep paths and giant ferns, along the abandoned trails of the Caddo, here in this forest as old as the sky and sea, live a pair of silver twins and an old hound who sings the blues, right here . . .

Puck . . .

       Sabine . . .

                  . . . and Ranger.

                                                            Here.

A timeless and universal story, indeed.

One of the most interesting parts of our discussion of this novel was about whether it’s really a book for kids. (The publisher recommends it for ages ten and up.) Our conversation about suitability evolved from a semi-serious Maybe this book should actually be banned! to a But wait. No book should be banned. But maybe some books should be read only with adult helpers who can offer context. Or maybe it’s a matter or not every book being for every reader.

I fondly remember being a Godly Play storyteller for K-2 kids back in the day. One of the things I enjoyed most was the “wondering” questions at the end—particularly: “I wonder where you are in the story?” Most kids would usually find themselves somewhere. But occasionally, a child would shrug and say Nowhere. I’m not in that story.

I wish there were no children who could see themselves in The Underneath. But unfortunately, because of the way of the world, I imagine many can. I think of immigrants, refugees, kids from broken families, homeless kids, abused kids. Kids in foster care, kids in seemingly odd, atypical families, kids who have lost a parent or feel responsible for siblings. Kids whose parents are incarcerated. Those young readers may see themselves in Puck and Sabine’s story, and—in some sense—be at home even with the terrifying parts. And I think those readers may find hope and community in the dark and holy Underneath.

— Sharelle Moranville