I Was Befriending My Anger: My favourite reads of 2025 (Q1, Part 1)
On Percival Everett's James and Mariana Enriquez's A Sunny Place For Shady People
This was supposed to be one succinct post, but in the story of my life, I yapped too much, and now it’s a two-parter.
Anywho, I read twenty-two books in the first quarter of 20251, and here’s the first wee batch of my favourites, presented in no order but the one I read them in.
Content warnings for each title can be found at the bottom of this post.
JAMES by Percival Everett (2024)
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Dominic Hoffman)
I have to confess upfront that I’ve never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of which James is a loose retelling (or perhaps closer to a re-imagining). In fact, prior to hearing a bunch of friends with excellent taste raving about James, my only understanding of the American children’s classic came from a Simpson’s homage and the memory of having seen a VHS cover of baby Elijah Wood in old-timey suspenders standing near a raft at some point in my life.
I did briefly consider reading Huckleberry Finn before I moved forward with James, but a) I’m a firm-ish believer that retellings and reimaginings should be able to stand alone as complete stories in their own right, as well as in conversation with their source texts, and going in sans source text is the best way to test that, and b) I didn’t wanna. So here we are.
James tells the story of “Jim,” an enslaved man in 1860’s Missouri who has secretly educated himself via the extensive library of a judge who lives on (or next to, or owns — I wasn’t too clear on the domestic layout) his owner’s property. Jim doesn’t lead a happy life, but he has found community with the other enslaved folk on the property, joy in his wife and daughter, and a certain amount of safety in knowing he’s considered one of the “good” slaves. The story kicks off, therefore, when Jim hears a rumour that he’s about to be sold.
Rather than be separated from his family, Jim runs away, intending to stay close until he can figure out a solution. It’s a doomed plan to start with, and only gets worse when he comes across his owner’s scrappy ward, thirteen-year-old “Huck,” who has convincingly faked his own death with pig’s blood and run away at the news that his violent, alcoholic father is coming back to town. Aware he must now be wanted for the murder of a white boy — the mere accusation of which is more than enough to see any Black man hanged in the south — Jim resolves to escape to a free northern state and work to earn the money to purchase his wife and daughter’s freedom.
What ensues is a kind of road trip story in which Jim and Huck, travelling mostly at night and largely along the Mississippi river, stumble from mishap to catastrophe as they make their way north. It’s an interesting pairing: Huck has all the privilege and confidence of whiteness, but with a dead mother and an abusive, deadbeat father is desperate to be loved, while Jim, who does feel some responsibility and affection towards this boy, has already spent all the love he has to give his wife and daughter, and is just trying not to die. Where Huck sees adventure and a growing camaraderie, Jim feels danger, obligation, and a growing resentment.
I’ve always been a big fan of road trip stories (even when the road in question is in fact a river), but they’re incredibly tricky to get right. The physical journey can lull the writer (and the reader) into a false sense of forward motion while the character journey itself stagnates. It can so easily go from a story to a sequence of events, distracting from its emptiness with interesting places and zany new characters. But Percival Everett manages to deliver the parade of location, characters and hijinks while keeping everything firmly grounded in the death of Jim, and the birth of James.
The name “Jim”, of course, wasn’t the name given to our protagonist by his parents. If they gave him one, he never heard it. “Jim” was assigned by one of his owners, as are most of the names of the Black characters we meet in the book. At multiple points of the book he tries on new ones, wondering what name he might choose for himself if ever given the luxury. The title of the book, of course, reveals his decision long before he makes it. But “James” is more than just a name.
Our protagonist, much like all the slaves we meet in the book who care about their survival, has a mask he wears in white company. The mask is cheerful, subservient, and speaks in a very specific dialect (called “slave talk” in the book). Everything about it is engineered to appeal to the idea of white superiority, and Jim is so good at it he gives anti-diction lessons to the Black children on his owner’s property, drilling them to make sure they never talk back to a white American, to never say anything that might imply they’re capable of intelligent — or critical — thought.
The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that.”
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”
Despite having spent no small amount of time in each other’s company, Huck doesn’t hear Jim speak in his real vernacular until they run away together. The first slip comes during a fever, in which a delirious Jim argues philosophy and race politics with a vision of Voltaire: easily explained away to a thirteen-year-old as a bout of mysterious madness. But the longer they spend on the run, and the more Jim sees of America — the more he sees his people mocked and reviled while their culture is appropriated for entertainment, the more atrocities against Black bodies he witnesses and experiences at the hands of cruel, ignorant people who believe their supremacy is natural and god-given — the harder it is for him to keep the mask in place.
I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.
The racist stereotype of Black men the world over2 is one centred around violence and anger. It’s an anger that is seen as innate, rather than ever having been earned: an unsubtle and intended reminder that Black people were, until only a few generations ago, legally and socially considered to be something lesser than human. Everett purposely subverts this stereotype in a way I found extremely effective. When we meet Jim, he’s not an angry man. Frustrated, sure, but his negative feelings are largely managed and vented through humour. He is resigned to the impossible situation he exists in, and is trying, somehow, to make the best of it. But, as he learns in the arduous journey that follows, there is no best of it. The system is built on violence, theft, suffering and cruelty. When James finally emerges from chrysalis of Jim, he is fucking furious, and he has earned every piece of it.
By the time I’d finished James, I was glad I’d ignored the brief temptation to read Huckleberry Finn first. There was something so satisfying, so subversive, so thematically appropriate in having James tell his side of this story first. It’s a book I plan to read again, though I’m of two minds as to whether I want to hear Huck’s side of things before I do. On one hand, I’d like to be able to appreciate the conversation being had between the two works, and to consider Everett’s adaptive choices. On the other, this work is a masterpiece all on its own, and the thought seeing James completely disappear behind the mask of Jim breaks my heart.
And on a third, less poignant hand… I still don’t really wanna.
If you are planning on checking James out, I highly recommend the audio version. Dominic Hoffman gives a fantastic performance, and the verbal code switching is really something to hear.
A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (2024)
Format: Paperback
Two things causes me to pick this book off the shelf. The first is that I’ve been eyeing off Mariana Enriquez’s absolute tome of a book, Our Share of Night for quite a while now, but as I’m so terrible at committing to books higher than 400 pages, I figured that dipping my toe into her writing via her short works might be more sensible. The second is that gloriously trippy, gross cover, featuring art by Pablo Gerardo Camacho3.
A Sunny Place for Shady People is Enriquez’s third collection of short horror stories, and while none of the stories in this book directly relate to each other, they all (bar one set in Los Angeles) take place in Argentina post 2020. These are, almost across the board, ghost stories, with Argentina their haunted house. Each story is a character piece in which Enriquez paints a rich portrait of her (mostly female) protagonists, and in doing so, weaves a tapestry of everyday people doing their best to survive in a country beset with governmental corruption, institutionalised neglect, and in the aftermath of a pandemic that made everything worse. Her prose (translated beautifully by Megan McDowell, who also translates for the fascinating Samanta Schweblin) is rich and emotional, and incredibly effective at conveying information without bogging the reader down. By the time each story ends it feels like you’ve spent time with someone real, in someplace real, and the regret at moving on from them is only relieved by a lifting of dense foreboding. I read this collection straight through, and the breaks between stories are like coming up for air before plunging back down into a too-warm, too-reedy lagoon.
But for all their sense of dread, these horror stories aren’t, for the most part, particularly frightening. Enriquez doesn’t hasten to or linger over the grotesque. Her focus seems to be on the human element, on connection, on emotion, on grief. All are largely left open-ended, leaving you with questions, but also the tools to answer some of them. She’s a wonderfully pensive writer, a masterful character artist, and now I have to go and buy her giant bloody novel to see what she does with a long form narrative. Because, my god, is she brilliant with just a few pages.
CONTENT WARNINGS (taken from The Storygraph):
James: Slavery, Racism, Racial slurs, Rape, Violence, Murder, War, Child abuse, Fire/Fire injury
A Sunny Place for Shady People: Body horror, Death, Blood, Rape, Death of parent, Suicide, Forced institutionalisation, Animal death, Cancer
Please note: these books were written with adult readers in mind.
Not including the liberal yet undocumented number of books begun and abandoned for the following reasons: not being in the mood for said book, throwing said book down in frustration over a plot development, getting violently annoyed by the characters of said book, hating the writing style of said book, and/or forgetting that said book exists or that I ever started reading it.
This book and this review is speaking specifically to Black, or African American men, but as a white Australian it would feel remiss not to point out that this shitty justification has been peddled by white (and other) colonisers against many Black and Indigenous (or, in Australia’s case, Bla(c)k Indigenous) bodies across the globe.
My partner very politely asked me to stop leaving this book on the kitchen table because the cover gave him the jibblies. Oh, that the same could be said of every horror book.