My Jim (2005)

While Huck and Jim were having their adventures on the Mississippi, what was happening to Jim's slave wife back in Hannibal? Nancy Rawles' My Jim, a slim, affecting spin-off of Twain's classic gives the resilient Sadie Watson a harrowing story and a powerful voice with which to tell it. She is whipped, abused, separated from her children, and sold down the river. As she tells Jim when he tracks her down decades later, ''I been all kinds of people since you seen me last.'' Rawles has produced a gritty, imaginative companion piece to Huckleberry Finn, in the revisionist tradition of Jean Rhys' haunting Wide Sargasso Sea.