I received this book for free from the library in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Source: the library
The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn
by
Robert Burleigh
picture book in a hardcover edition that was published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers on March 8, 2011 and has 48 pages.
Explore it on Goodreads or Amazon
Illustrator: Barry Blitt
A standalone biography about Mark Twain as told by Huckleberry Finn.
My Take
Now this would be a handy tome for you writers wantin’ to write dialect for your characters. You can hear Huck’s larnin’ and status so easily through his speech.
Be sure to explore the front endpapers with all those ink sketches of times in Twain’s life. The kids will adore all those splotches! And the “Warning to the Reader” page is quite handy to explore the use of dialect with the kids…if you can figger it out from the variety of fonts and sizes!
The graphics are all awash in pale inks. The color comes in with Huck’s language and sentence structure. And them verbs are all askew as well.
It literally is Huck talkin’ Twain’s life and how it relates to his own. Burleigh slides in some commentary about critics not liking how Huck’s dialogue was written, so undereducated and all as well as Twain’s anger about how blacks were treated. Lots of possible discussions in this.
There’s a very handy list of dates that relate to the important events in Twain’s life at the very end. It could be interesting to match up world events with these years to see what was happening when Twain was. Happening, that is.
All in all, read it. It’s fun to “hear” Huck a’talkin’ away and bringing the time to life.
The Characters
Huckleberry Finn is our naive narrator.
Mark Twain, a.k.a., Samuel Clemens, is the subject of this picture biography. Olivia “Livy” Langdon was Sam’s wife. Susy was Sam’s favorite daughter.
The Cover and Title
The cover is pale with a pale blue river for Huck, barefoot in rolled-up brown trousers, a slingshot in his back pocket, a wide-brimmed and raggedy straw hat, his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up as he poles his way along with that fountain pen, standing on a raft of a book that features Mark Twain himself with the author’s and illustrator’s names below Twain’s portrait. It’s all quite inky looking, especially most of that title at the top with its scratchy font done up in deep blue ink and some of it (along with Huck’s name) in a brown to match Huck’s pants and hair.
The title is exactly that, The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn, as he remembers Samuel Clemens.
