James by Percival Everett

 

This got a lot of buzz in the past year-ish, and I can see why. It's a "reimagining" of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the POV of a much more erudite Jim, and it has a lot of inversions of Twain's novel that definitely at least play-act as subversions, and the people who give awards to books love subversions. There's a lot of humor extracted from the slaves' code-switching, and that feels good at first but gradually starts to wear thin as it starts to feel like the only joke the novel has in it. Then it starts to drift from Twain, and it actually gets more interesting, if still vaguely picaresque; James certainly seems to be a more reliable narrator--he's at least not the naïf Huck is. It's interesting to me that a novel so clearly in conversation with an earlier novel is at its strongest (and its strongest is very strong, to be clear) when there is less Huckleberry Finn (and less Huckleberry Finn) in it.