by Percival Everett
Doubleday, 2024. 302 pages. Historical Fiction
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Twain's original novel remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Fans of literary fiction and historical fiction will appreciate James, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize and won the National Book Award for fiction this year. Percival Everett turns Huckleberry Finn on its head, offering new insight into a familiar story through strong characterization. In contrast to Twain’s stereotypical and childlike portrayal of Jim, Everett repaints him as a calm and strategic thinker playing a minstrel role to protect his family at all costs. James is a beautiful and haunting retelling, set apart by its lyrical writing.
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by Barbara Kingsolver
Harper, 2022. 546 pages. Fiction
Demon Copperhead resets David Copperfield in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It's the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
by Jean Rhys
Norton, 1966. 189 pages. Fiction
With Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
by Madeline Miller
Ecco, 2012. 378 pages. Fiction
Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War.
SGR
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