book 1 of SHELVE12: James // Percival Everett

Feb 12, 2025

Welcome to book one of SHELVE12*! This month’s read was highly lauded in the second half of 2024, and is now a National Book Award winner. Safe to say, maybe you’ve heard of it. 😉

*Wait, what’s SHELVE12 again?

Twelve books. Twelve months. One (extremely low-stakes) lit fic book club. Catch up on the details, including the 12 books on the list and the highly specific themes and requirements, right here!

Book 1 of 12: James // Percival Everett

Published: 2024
Genre specifics: American Literature; Satire; Literary Fiction
320 pages (but reads like 220 pages, because it’s almost all dialogue)
One sentence description: James follows the untold story of Jim (aka the titular “James” and the enslaved man from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) as he embarks on a harrowing journey to freedom, revealing his intelligence, resilience, and maybe the truth behind the classic tale.

Why was it chosen as one of the 12?

This one is kind of a special case! It was definitely a missed-it-last-year hype train choice, but it was also highly recommended to me by … well, everyone. The bookseller I bought it from, most of my internet friends, AND my book club friend, who ended up choosing it for us to read in the month of January. I love it for this challenge because it’s literary fiction, but also a critique of classic American literary fiction. Very meta.

First line read?

Definitely starts with a bang, I would keep reading if I only had this to go on.

What’s the review?

I loved James. It is an incredibly clever retelling that adds so much to the existing world of Huck Finn. I loved so much about it— the title, which is perfect and impressively sums up the entire point of the book in a single word, and also the really spare writing style. Heavy dialogue, very minimal description, and I flew through the story while also appreciating the way Everett leans heavily on language to show the humanity and inhumanity of his characters. An important story, told beautifully.

The critique of the classic Huck Finn story really lights up the side of me that loved sitting in English class. Following an old character with a completely new perspective made me think about everything that was left unsaid in the original work, and it left me with a general question about literature— whose stories get to be told because we’ve formalized publishing?

How incredible to be able to teach James and Huck Finn together in an English class, goosebumps!!

Any underlines?

Actually, quite a few! I aspire to be an aesthetic annotator, but I truly just don’t have the handwriting for it. (Sometimes I also just literally don’t have a pen— you get it.) But I did take some quick notes while reading James, to bring to my book club. Most of them had to do with James educating on how to appear uneducated and “inoffensive” to the white people that surround him and his peers, which was such a huge theme of the book. This one is a bit heavy-handed, but I think very effective:

Character compass: borrow, befriend, banish

This is our character litmus test going forward. In James, there are simply too many characters to banish and the historical context is too serious for something so lighthearted, so we’ll start next month!

Would you rather?

Would I rather have been reading something else? Nope! I was happy to be here with this book, and the style of the writing made it absolutely FLY by for me. I read most of it in one day, after letting it languish on my coffee table with a book mark in page 20 for about a month.

Worth the shelf space?

COMPLETELY worth the shelf space. This is the kind of book you buy and keep on your shelf forever to revisit or lend, and I think it’s a contemporary classic.

Project check in, how’s SHELVE12 going?

So far, I’m thriving with a little more structure to my reading choices! But, to be fair, I’m one month in. AND I’ll also add, this was a major double dip month for me, since this overlapped with my other “required reading” (I use this term loosely) of the month, so I have a feeling this will be one of the easiest months of all. All this to say, I’ll keep you updated as we get deeper into this challenge.

What are we reading next?

Next up is MADWOMAN // Chelsea Bieker!

I am overjoyed to pick this one up— I was the world’s biggest fan of Bieker’s book Godshot and I think I’ve recommended it 50 times since I first read it. If you want to laugh with me about the editing in this picture, please do, but I stand by the review in the caption. Grab a copy and I’ll see you here again in March!

The one sentence pitch: Clove has spent years concealing the dark truth of her childhood from her husband and children, but when a letter from her supposedly dead mother arrives in her PO box, she is forced to confront the past she tried so hard to bury.