A Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock

In the year 2077 Huck Finn reflects back on his life, beginning in 1835 when he and the escaped slave Jim began their raft journey down the Mississippi River. Somehow they became time travelers until Hurricane Katrina shipwrecked Huck back into passing time.

Along the way, they saw America caught in wars, the marvel of electric lighting, and how racism kept its grip on society.

Jim got off the raft in 1960, finding a lynch mob waiting for him. In 2005 Huck meets James, who tries to keep him from harm. As an adult, Huck falls in love with Jameson, who becomes his wife. She writes a novel, The Boy In His Winter. Like Jim, James and Jameson are African American.

What Huck realizes from his vantage point of 85 years is how badly he treated Jim, how he accepted his society's values unthinking, diminishing Jim as a person and as a friend.

"I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I'm not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used.(...)We'd wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we were close in on the river's end, which as not to be the journey's end, as I learned later." Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

At the end of his life, Huck returns to his hometown to play act Mark Twain, telling his own life stories. Huck calls his story a comedy, having seen enough for 'three or four lifetimes."

"Haven't you learned by now how fantastic a business it is to be alive?"-Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

The novel is episodic, meandering as the Mississippi River, but I was charmed by Huck's narrative, although there is nothing of innocence to be found. Huck is deformed by societal values, pursuing wealth and conspicuous consumption as an adult as thoughtlessly as he accepted slavery in his youth. With a broad overview of American history distilled into one lifetime, and grappling with memory and how the past is altered with our storytelling of it, Huck's tale shows the darkness behind what we remember as Twain's story of boyish freedom.

I received a book from the publisher as part of a LibraryThing giveaway.

The Boy in His Winter
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-934137-76-5