As always, Mark Twain is brilliant in his critique of human nature.

I will contrast this book to Tom Sawyer, as they are similar, but not the same. As in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is brilliantly hilarious. It has a large section of it dedicated to fraudsters, while Tom Sawyer is focused more on everyday people in a small town. Huck Finn includes many small towns as well but focuses more on a black man, Jim, who has runaway. Most of the book is about Huck and Jim, but there's a wide cast of other characters, and two fraudsters take up several chapters. The scams they pull over on people are comical, tragic, and sad.

The book has a considerable commentary, especially in the later half, on slavery and morality--often overlapping. It's a bit odd/uncomfortable to read Huck's perspective, which is that by helping Jim escape, he is doing something terribly wrong. His conscious is constantly pricking him to turn Jim in. While this is uncomfortable to read, that doesn't make it bad. This book is simply showing us Huck's perspective as it is--Twain never preaches a morality message with his stories; he simply describes human nature and lets us draw our own conclusions.

I will say though, it was an odd sense of relief when Huck finally chooses to just commit himself to freeing Jim--and therefore commit himself to being destined, in his mind, for Hellfire. Such an odd feeling, reading that.

I couldn't quite bring myself to give this five stars. What bothered me was that it dragged in places in a repetitive way, especially towards the end. For example in the ways that Tom insists on book-romanticizing things...it was hilarious at first, but it just got really repetitive.

With that said, this book really helps you get outside of yourself and into someone else's thoughts and experiences, and for that it is brilliant, let alone the comedy, the characters, the dialects, and the rich exploration of river culture in Missouri.