Book Reviews With Jenny Dowell
This is the home of Jenny Dowell OAM's monthly book review.
Jenny is an avid reader and vocal supporter of libraries. Her reviews are always thought-provoking and well constructed. A link to reserve each book appears at the end of her review. You can receive Jenny's reviews and other exciting news every month in our library eNewsletter by subscribing at the following link www.rtrl.nsw.gov.au/subscribe.
March 2025
Jamesby Percival Everett
While few Australians will have read Mark Twain’s great American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we are at least familiar with the basic story line.
In the better-know latter book, in 1861, Huckleberry (Huck) Finn, fakes his own death to run away from his alcoholic and abusive father. Jim, a slave owned by Huck’s guardian is also fleeing, having heard that he is to be sold and forced to leave his wife and daughter.
Together they undertake an epic raft journey down the Mississippi River to the dream of freedom in non-slavery states. Jim hopes that his freedom will allow him to return to liberate his family.
Some readers may also know that Twain’s original story is told in Huck’s first-person voice.
In this Everett novel, we hear the same storyline with the same encounters but this time, in Jim’s voice.
The first thing that struck me in the novel was the regular use of the horrific ‘N word’ by the white characters. This was also common in the original Huckleberry Finn novel and was uncomfortable for many readers when it was a school text in USA schools in the mid 20th century.
Using it in James is even more shocking today but it was important to be true to the era of the original. In fact it’s just one of the horrific racist reminders of the white supremacist view that was common.
What struck me next in this retelling, is the language used by Jim when speaking to whites. In chapter two, Jim is giving language lessons to his daughter and six other children. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them”, he tells them. Jim tutors the children to translate from the standard grammar they use between themselves, to the expected register “da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be”.
Jim can read and write but hides that from whites including Huck.
Last month, I wrote about The Reformatory, a novel exposing racism in the Southern USA States almost a century after this novel’s setting. There are sadly, so many attitudes that did not change in those 90 years. As we observe the present day USA, it seems there is still a long way to go. But we in Australia, can hardly hold a holier-than-thou attitude to race relations.
James is a magnificent read. It contains humour, horror, and hope. While entertaining, it is also deeply thought-provoking. Unlike Huck who enjoys the larks and escapades of an adventure down the river, James is constantly in fear for his life.
This book is rightly being acclaimed as the re-writing of the original, and giving James a three dimensional presence missing in the original.
If you have read the original, I’m sure this re-imagining will be extra meaningful for you, but if—like me—you haven’t read the Twain story, I can assure you that James is a full and rich experience that will engage you completely.
Thank you Percival Everett for providing non-Americans an insight into one of your classics, while teaching us that there is another perspective to the Hucklebery Finn canon.
Available as a paperback, large-print edition, ebook, and eaudiobook on the library catalogue.
February 2025
by Tananarive Due
This historical fiction is grounded in horrific times in Florida, USA.
The Gracetown School for Boys is a reformatory, a segregated prison farm for mostly young black boys, but also some poor white boys albeit in a different section of the compound. Yes, there’s some education involved, but mostly it is slave labour with ample doses of cruelty, and more.
This is Jim Crow America of the 1950s, where fierce segregation laws were in place (Jim Crow was an insulting name for Black Americans in that era).
The book is big. The story is big.
The Reformatory is about racism, humiliation, abuse, and murder.
The boys in this dreadful place are driven by the desperate need to simply survive.
Young Robert Stephens, aged 12, is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys as punishment for kicking a white son of a local wealthy landowner who made sexual advances to Robert’s 16-year-old sister, Gloria.
Author Tananarive Due is an educator and film historian with a special interest in Black horror. She has won numerous awards for her writing. At the start of the book, Due, lists the names of three family members including a great uncle, Robert Stephens, who died in Dozier school for boys in Florida in 1937.
While not biographical, there are elements of family history in this book.
Young Robert Stephens is an engaging protagonist with whom it is easy to empathise. From his swift kick to the knee of the boy harassing his loved sister, to his shame when he wets his pants in front of the school’s superintendent, Haddock—readers will relate. As his fear grows that his mishap will be discovered if a wet patch appears on the floor, we feel for him.
The book is also about competition and fear that is engendered between the boys, and about loyalty that develops in the face of shocking treatment. The dreaded ‘Funhouse’ and 'The Box’ are punishment rooms for the boys who break the rules or fail to inform on their peers.
During Robert’s time at the school, several other boys die and soon Robert is seeing these boys as haints around him. Robert has been raised with a fear of haints—the often-malevolent ghosts that conjure images and smells of past horrors. The haints of The Reformatory are not visible to most, but they drift around Robert with smells of burning flesh and images of brutality and bloody murder. These haints are often boys with horrific wounds and reflect that in the 1920s fire had claimed the lives of 30 inmates at this feared school. Haddock has strong motivations to expel these haints and enlists Robert as a haunt catcher.
Meanwhile, sister Gloria embarks on a crusade to set Robert free.
This is an epic novel. Although only set over a few months, it is broad in its scope, combining the story of Robert’s absent father, his dead mother, his brave and determined sister, and the broader society that facilitated racism, failed to question the cruelty, and ignored the evidence of abuse leading to death.
The Reformatory is almost 600 pages in length and has relatively few light moments, but it’s also an important read.
Young Robert is an example of many young black boys in mid century in the southern states of America. There are similarities to the stories from Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home that operated here in NSW from 1924 to 1970.
Robert’s story, like those of our country’s shameful stolen generations, should not be forgotten.
It was satisfying to note the reclaiming of ‘crow’ near the end of the book, as a term denoting survival and strength.
My only issue with this book is that it could have been a little more compact, but that’s a minor point.
Highly recommended.
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Happy reading!
♥