I hated reading this book. My 1 star review is not because I think the book is low quality, but rather because I did not like reading it. It's a nasty book, a snake to be handled carefully. I'm glad to be done with it.

I could not get past the racism of the book. I understand Twain was writing satire and holding up a mirror to American racism. The writing is deliberately racist. It's still an unrelentingly racist novel. And therefore so, so painful to read. I don't think that makes the book malicious, I think it's worth reading and teaching. But it sure makes for an ugly read.

To get the easy critique out of the way, the word "nigger". It's infamously all over the book and is offensive by modern standards. But I think it was intended to be offensive in the context of the book and its time, too. Specifically the way Jim is never ever referred to as a man or a human being. He is "the nigger". The constant repetition of the word is intensely dehumanizing. Even when he's being feted for saving Tom's life, the highest praise is "a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars". I accept that as pointed satire, or at least verisimilitude, but it makes for hard reading.

There's a deeper structural racism in the writing that I can't justify, the way Jim is not a fleshed out character. He's passive, never given complex motivations or inner monologue. He's off stage for a lot of the action, particularly the Duke and King section. For most of the book Huck Finn doesn't give a damn about Jim's need for freedom, doesn't try to help him get to safety. He does finally come to some basic form of humanity in chapter 31, but it didn't ring particularly strongly to me. And then later when Huck and Tom go to free Jim from captivity they literally turn it into a game, dragging the escape out into a weeks-long farce. Tom never even conveys the news that Jim is legally free. It's just hideous treatment of a man very much in mortal peril. Maybe there's some clever reason Twain wrote it this way, or maybe it's just he couldn't imagine writing a Black man as a protagonist. Either way I didn't care for it.

There's cleverness and nuance in the writing. I admire it as a full-throated document of American racism, a book that forces readers to grapple with just how we treated African-Americans in the 19th century. It's just really painful to read that, particularly alone.

Some further reading I found helpful:

Toni Morrison's book introduction
Teaching Huck Finn Without Regret