I needed to let this book simmer for several days in my mind after finishing it before I wrote up a review. I re-read Huck Finn immediately prior to reading this book for the first time since high school, and I'm really glad that I did that. I barely remembered anything about Huck Finn beyond "Huck and Jim escape down the river on a raft", and having the full context of the plot and themes of that book in mind made reading James much richer for me. It absolutely can be read and appreciated on its own, but I really enjoyed the added texture of having both in mind.

I thought at the beginning that this book would be similar to Demon Copperhead and follow the beats of the original story exactly, so I was pleasantly surprised when it took a pretty strong deviation. I think that is part of what I really needed to rotate in my mind about how brilliant this book is: the ways that it takes not only the classic book of Huck Finn and turns it on its head but also so many of the things that we think we know about that time period.

At first I was a little thrown by the decision to make Huck James' son, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt like such a brilliant choice. How does one get a mixed baby in the 1850s? Almost universally by a white enslaver raping a Black woman. To have Huck be the child of a white mother and Black man who have known each other their whole lives is such an unexpected turn of events, and for Huck to grapple with what it means for *he himself* to be mixed race instead of slowly recognizing that Jim is a human being in the original text is so much more interesting. I also had to reckon with my own biases in that I wanted to see *more* of Huck's grappling and found myself disappointed that this reveal came so close to the end and so briefly. But this isn't Huck's story! It's James'! We saw exactly the right amount of this and we can fill in our own projected gaps if we want.

I've never read any of Percival Everett's other work (though I did see American Fiction and really enjoyed how nuanced and layered that story was) but I definitely want to read more after reading this book. It's definitely the type of work that makes you feel one way when you first consume it and then as it percolates through your brain, you appreciate just how many layers there are to analyze.