- Most reviewers and literary critics highly anticipated this superb novel would win this year's Booker Prize but it didn't. Perhaps because it's not really original but a reworking of Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- Unlike Twain Everett digs deep into the cruelty of slavery. And his narrator is not Huck but Jim, Huck's black companion and an escaping slave. Huck is the supporting character. James is the lead. It's a highly dramatic story, with action aplenty.
- James and his slave friends speak to each other in perfect English, but in ‘the correct incorrect grammar’ to their white masters, because the whites need to ‘feel superior’. James gives the children language lessons: Let’s try some situational translations...'And the better they feel, the safer we are’ becomes Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be. He is highly intelligent and literate, having taught himself from reading books in his former owner Judge Thatcher’s extensive library. He dreams of Voltaire and his liberal views on racism and ‘hierarchy’.
- James and Huck are real friends. Huck is running away from his abusive father, and James has to leave his wife and daughter and hide away because Miss Watson, his owner, wants to sell him to a man in New Orleans.
- On their journey down the Mississippi river in various stolen canoes and hastily thrown together rafts they meet plenty of strange and dangerous characters. Crooks and liars posing as the 'King of France' and the 'Duke of Bridgewater'; the 'Virginia Minstrels', a group of singers in blackface; Henderson the repeat rapist of young black girls; a steamer full of white thrill-seekers powered by a starving young black man shovelling coal into the furnace 24/7.
- The word 'nigger' is common parlance. When Twain's original novel was published in 1884, after the civil war, many critics condemned it for frequently using this horrific word. In fact even today many school libraries refuse to hold it, accusing it, ironically, of racism. What Everett has done in his new version is to openly confront the real ugliness of racism at its core. It's a confronting read, and very powerful indeed.
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