Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Pros: Fun, insightful, timeless

Cons: Needs to be read to be enjoyed

The Bottom Line: A great book that should need no introduction, but due to misrepresentations by rogues, does. Read Huckleberry Finn for your own enjoyment and enlightenment.

Review: Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1885) NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of ...

Pros: everything! a classic

Cons: Jim's dialect will slow you down

The Bottom Line: Not sure how young Huck is, but I'm guessing around 11 or 12. Thanks, Brendan!

Review: --NOTICE—Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banned; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G., CHIEF OF ...

Pros: Insightful novel that can be read on various levels

Cons: Some will have difficulty getting past the language

The Bottom Line: There's more to Huckleberry Finn than the dreaded "N" word!

Review: In an 1887 letter to W. D. Howells, Mark Twain wrote “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.” In one sense this is quite true of his immortal The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; however, this classic...

Pros: An American classic for all time.

Cons: None.

The Bottom Line: A timeless classic with a powerful message about race, respect and friendship.

Review: We all know the plot, so there's no sense in rehashing it; "Huckleberry Finn" is one book that has probably been reviewed to death. But this book has generated a great deal of heat and very little light lately; it's been banned in some school districts ...

Pros: A wonderful allegory of slave-era America set amidst fun adventures.

Cons: Has the easily offended in arms against it.

Review: Yes, it's true. Poor Huck Finn has been tossed out of more schools than nearly any other book in print, a victim of the touchy-feely political correctness movement. I know what you're thinking "Was it sex?" Sorry to disappoint you, but no....

Pros: Funny and real characters. Twain uses a child to discuss the ills of society.

Cons: One of society's ills is its short-sightedness.

Review: "All modern literature stems from this one book. There was nothing before, there has been nothing as good since." I wish I could have been the one to coin that description of Twain's best known work. I guess coming from Ernest Hemingway it...

Pros: the brilliant characterizations and the essence of the time Twain captures so well

Cons: the only con is if the reader is too politically correct for his/her own good

The Bottom Line: This novel is quintessentially American - and should be read because it is both brilliant and incisive.

Review: Only Mark Twain could have one of his characters start a novel by referring to his previous book - and get away with it.

Huckleberry Finn is a teen-age boy in the South, who in the sort of prequel to this book(The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), is...

Pros: One of the great classics with one of the grandest themes

Cons: None, no matter what anyone says!

Review: I first read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" when I was about nine years old. I didn't dislike it, but I had the sense that there was something in it that I wasn't quite getting, so I put it aside and returned to it about six years later,...

Pros: Evocative description, funny, earthy yet profound, knife-sharp observations, satire, adventure

Cons: Reading "Tom Sawyer" a slight prerequisite

The Bottom Line: A must-read, for fun, for thought, for adventure, for being taken to another America, whose painful legacies haunt the country to this day.

Review: Unlike a lot of youngsters, I was not forced to read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in school by some classroom tyrant; I discovered it of my own free will, and was glad I did. Even granted that you have to read the high-spirited "Adventures of...

Pros: humor, satire, suspense

Cons: dialect may be difficult to get used to at first

Review: The first time I started to read Huck Finn, I put it down after a few chapters because of the annoying dialect used by the slave, Jim. The second time around I neglected a paper I had due the next day because I couldn't put the book down. The book read...