Through the Cracks is a review series focusing on the ones that got away. These are timeless classics that everyone has read—everyone, that is, except the reviewer, who is finally getting around to reading a book which somehow slipped through the cracks and trying to see if it’s really all it’s cracked up to be.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those books that most of us read in our teens. Most of us, that is, except me, who read the first few chapters in my ninth grade English class and then faked it. It wasn’t that I was a reluctant reader; though I spent a lot of my adolescent years playing Legend of Zelda, it’s likely that I blew off reading Huck Finn because I was too engrossed in some Star Trek novel or the steamy Neanderthal sex scenes in Jean M. Aul’s Clan of the Cave Bear. I recently read Huck Finn for real, and though I recalled more of the plot than I realized (a testament to my English teacher since I hadn’t actually, you know, read most of it) I was shocked at how much different it is from the novel I’d always figured it to be. What I’d taken for a boyish adventure down the Mississippi turned out to be more of a scathingly satirical trip into America’s Heart of Darkness, as funny and troubling as Conrad’s little trip down the Congo and into the human soul is horrific.
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Friends of Atticus 