The conceit is audacious. Everett retells Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' from the perspective of Jim — here called James — the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi. But 'retelling' is too passive a word. Everett detonates Twain's novel from within, using its scaffolding to construct something that is simultaneously a faithful companion piece and a devastating critique.

James, as Everett writes him, is a man of extraordinary intelligence who has learned to perform ignorance as a survival strategy. The novel's most brilliant invention is its treatment of language: when white people are present, James speaks in the dialect Twain assigned him. When he is alone or among other enslaved people, he speaks in eloquent, philosophical prose. The effect is electric. Every scene of apparent simplicity is revealed to contain a hidden architecture of resistance.

Everett follows the rough trajectory of Twain's plot — the river journey, the King and the Duke, the stops at various plantations — but diverges in ways that are both shocking and inevitable. James's interior life, which Twain rendered as broad comedy, becomes in Everett's hands a meditation on consciousness, freedom, and the performative nature of identity under oppression.

The novel's middle section, in which James is separated from Huck and must navigate a series of increasingly dangerous situations alone, is some of the most gripping fiction I have read in years. Everett writes violence with a restraint that makes it more terrible — you feel each act of cruelty as a violation not just of the body but of the elaborate dignity James has constructed to survive.

There is also humor here, though it is humor of a particular kind: the laughter of a man who sees the absurdity of the world that enslaves him and cannot say so. James teaches himself to read in secret, engages in silent philosophical debates with Voltaire and Locke, and maintains a running internal commentary on the white characters' obliviousness that is both comic and heartbreaking.

The ending — which I will not reveal — departs entirely from Twain and achieves a kind of tragic grandeur that elevates the novel from brilliant literary exercise to something approaching myth. Everett has not merely rewritten Huckleberry Finn. He has answered it.