Written by: Angela Shelf Medcaris and John Ward
First line: It was finally Christmas Day!
Why you should read this book: It is apparently based on a short story written by William Falkner, which was apparently based on a true story. In the antebellum south, an enslaved Black man named Jim makes a deal: it's Christmas day and slavery is, from a literary perspective, supposed to be nominally less inhumane on Christmas, to the point that a man who is totally cool with owning human beings agrees to allow Jim his freedom if Jim can tell him a riddle to which he can't guess the answer. It takes Jim an entire year and a few observations of the natural world, but he succeeds.
Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess I'm personally uncomfortable with this type of narrative because it seems to mitigate the horrors of slavery and I'm not sure we need light hearted stories about human bondage, especially in a country where the evils of slavery continue to echo, loudly, through society and continue to harm living people.
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