My Jim

In this highly acclaimed work, American Book Award winner Nancy Rawles "creates important new dimensions to a classic American story" (Seattle Times). Sadie, left unnamed in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, is the wife Huck's slave friend Jim was forced to leave behind. As her only remaining granddaughter prepares for marriage, Sadie takes down the jar she has kept with her through slavery to freedom. The two will make a quilt and Sadie will finally describe why all those little objects in thejar mean so much to her: the knife that was her mother's, the piece of an African congo bowl, a tar-covered pipe, a piece of Jim's hat-the one found floating in the river after he fled to freedom with a skinny white boy and was thought dead. These were the few things Sadie could call her own. Sadie and Marianne, voiced in soothing dialect by Brenda Pressley and Lizzy Cooper Davis, share their moving story. Rawles illuminates a beloved character with this vivid re-imagining."Rawles has concocted a language that retains the richness of oral expression and achieves a smooth cadence on the page. My Jim is a compelling, eloquently written novel that can stand on its own merits beside the great works that inspired it."-San Francisco Chronicle