The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is an American novel set in the mid 1800s. Following the events of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the novel’s main protagonist is Huck, short for Huckleberry Finn. Huck is a young boy from St. Petersburg, Missouri. He lives with the Widow Douglas, a kind but strict woman who adopts Huck, and the widow’s sister, Miss Watson. From the end of Tom Sawyer, Huck also had acquired a considerable sum of money from finding a stash of gold. At the start of the novel, Huck is unsatisfied with his life, believing that the widow’s strict care is restricting his freedom. Thus, he craves adventure and joins a gang led by Tom Sawyer. However, Huck’s comfortable life is disrupted when his drunken and abusive father, Pap, comes back into town. People within the town had tried to reform Pap and help improve his life, but these attempts all failed and Pap quickly reverted back to his old ways. Pap finds Huck and threatens him, enraged that he has learned to read and write. Eventually, when the widow tells Pap to stay away from the house and from Huck, Pap kidnaps Huck and brings him to his cabin across the river from St. Petersburg.

At Pap’s cabin, Pap locks Huck inside the cabin every time he leaves to go to town, and every time he returns he is drunk and beats his son. After some time, Huck decides to fake his own death in order to escape. He waits until Pap leaves for town and feigns a break in. Then he takes a raft down the river to Jackson’s Island. There, he meets Jim, a slave of Miss Watson. Jim had run away because he had overheard Miss Watson considering selling him to a plantation in the South, which would force him to be separated from his family. Thus, the pair continue down the Mississippi river, avoiding other people because a reward has been offered for Jim’s capture. Their plan is to continue downstream to the mouth of the Ohio river, then travel up that river to enter the Northern states, where Jim can be free and later return for his family. Along the way, Huck and Jim go through a series of adventures. In one of them, the Mississippi River floods, and they encounter a log house raft, in which they find the body of a man who has been shot. Another adventure occurs when a fog causes the pair to miss the mouth of the Ohio, and the two encounter a group of slave catchers. Here, Huck struggles with a moral dilemma, unsure of whether he should turn in Jim or protect his friend. He decides to lie to the slave catchers, claiming that he has a contagious disease, thus allowing himself and Jim to evade the slave catchers. The next night, the two are separated, and Huck ends up being taken in by a family called the Grangerfords.

The Grangerfords are a family of Southern Aristocrats. Although they are kind to Huck and treat him like family, they have a long-standing feud with another family, the Shepherdsons. This feud escalates when one of the Grangerford daughters elopes with a Shepherdson, leading to a fierce gun battle between the two families, in the middle of which Huck is caught. However, Jim turns out to have been hiding near the Grangerford home, and Huck is reunited with him, so the two continue their journey down the river. Along the way, they are joined by two con-artists, who claim to be an English Duke (the duke) and the rightful ruler of France (the king). The duke and the king attempt to scam a few towns along the way, but their largest scam is unsuccessful. After some time, the two con artists sell Jim to a farmer, stating that he is a runaway slave. Huck seeks after his friend, and discovers that Jim is being held by Silas and Sally Phelps, who happen to be the uncle and aunt of Tom Sawyer. When Huck approaches their house, Aunt Sally calls him “Tom” and Huck decides to go along with it. Huck realizes that Tom is coming to visit, so he intercepts Tom as he is approaching the home and explains the situation to him. Tom improvises and pretends to be his own half-brother, Sid. Tom creates a wildly imaginative and unnecessary plan to free Jim, which Huck reluctantly agrees to. The night that the two boys decide to execute their plan, they are pursued by local townspeople, and Tom ends up being shot in the leg. Jim gives up his freedom to take care of Tom while Huck goes to fetch a doctor. All three end up back at the Phelps house. There, Tom regains his health and reveals to Huck that Jim had actually been a freed man for two months, since Miss Watson had died and freed Jim in her will, and that his plan to escape was completely unnecessary. Tom’s aunt, Polly, also arrives and clears up the confusion with the Phelpses. As Tom works out plans to leave, Huck worries about his future, particularly about the reappearance of his father, but Jim reassures him that this will not happen, as he reveals that the dead man inside the floating house turned out to be his father. Although Aunt Sally offers to adopt him, Huck decides to continue to seek adventure, and announces that he will set out West.

One thing I really liked about this novel is how Twain utilizes satire to support his point of view. Twain wrote this novel during the mid-1880s, about twenty years after the Civil War,  and was deeply critical of slavery and the societal norms of Antebellum America. Through the example of Pap, Twain criticizes bad parenting styles and the ignorance of men during the time. For example, the fact that Pap forbids Huck from learning to read utilizes situational irony because a parent would normally wish for their children to learn and grow as much as possible. Furthermore, by exaggerating how outlandish Tom’s escape plan is, Twain criticizes the idea of romantic imaginations.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed reading this novel. The adventure was exciting and Twain’s message is extremely clear. Although the dialogue might be a bit confusing, it’s still easy to follow the story and understand what is going on. Thus, I recommend this book to people that like adventures or are simply interested in reading a great piece of American literature.

Checkout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Newport Beach Public Library.