Manga Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

My thoughts:

This is a recreation of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in manga format. I think what initially was a bit jarring was the depiction of Huck. I understand that it is part of the manga genre, but drawing a young boy from the south in the androgynous manga style was a bit disconcerting. Perhaps as a reader I am too familiar with the work as well as the movies. However, once I put that aside, the writers of this manga classic do a good job of trying to make decisions to use some of the different dialects found in the original Twain novel. In other words, there is "Jim speak, " there is "Huck speak," and then there is narration which I think is understandable enough for the middle reader. 

I am not sure if the text is understandable to ELL (English language learners), but I think the combination of pictures and text, especially if readers are able to "read" the emotions coming from the characters in the stylized manga drawings, does a good job of helping to bridge to the original novel.

At 300+ pages, this is a hefty tome. It is not a one night read. In addition, there is a lot to read. That is not a bad thing. It is just something to think about when giving this to middle readers, and struggling middle readers. It could be used as a pre-read if teachers are actually wanting students to just get the gist of the plot before going into some closer discussion. However, in my opinion, the publishers created this to be a substitute for the original text rather than a hook or bridge into the original text. It is substantial, but as a former English teacher, I don't think it's enough. 

One of the major conversations happening right now is about the rise of "hate" speech that is blatantly racist, misogynistic, homophobic.  Pap's "govment" speech in Twain's chapter 6, recreated in a classroom, read aloud with all its spittle and compared to  the open rantings of Sheriff Clark of Selma, Alabama at the height of the protests for voting rights of African Americans in the 60's south and the current protests and speeches coming out of the south as well as our own "govment" in 2017 is the kind of dialogue that must happen in our classrooms. Twain's literature is the way in. His hook to engage the reader is the humor and irony, but the manga is missing the lessons we need to learn as Americans so that we can recognize not only how to move forward through education, but also be aware of when the histories in our literature as well as in our historical non fictions (like the three part graphic novels March by Senator John Lewis) point to the fact that we are standing still or moving backwards.