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** spoiler alert ** I'm sure most of you know the story - Huckleberry Finn fakes his own death to escape his shiftless, abusive father, and takes off on a raft down the river accompanied by runaway slave Jim. They have various adventures with half-sunken river boats, feuding families, and a couple of conmen leading to Huck needing to rescue Jim from one of the conmen's nefarious plots.

But the core of the story is the relationship between Huck and Jim. Jim's affectionate care for Huck becomes that of a father, the kind of father Huck never had. Jim doesn't have any learning, and he's gullible, but the gullibility is due to his kind and trusting nature. Jim really is too good to be true, he's such a paragon of loving patience. His only weakness is that gullibility, really. Without that flaw, Jim really would be unbelievable.

Huck's own feelings for Jim are confused - he cares for Jim, but at first he sees him not as an equal, but as a "nigger" and a slave. Not only that, because Jim is a runaway slave he feels guilty about helping him and not returning him home. Conflicting the issue is the debt Huck owes to Jim's owner, Miss Watson, who taught Huck how to read and write while he was living with her sister, the Widow Douglas.

The various adventures that Huck and Jim have rafting down the Mississippi serve to show Huck again and again that Jim is one of the finest people he'll ever meet. Jim isn't caught up in a stupid feud that no one can even remember how it started. Instead, he's hiding out, waiting anxiously to hear that Huck is safe and sound. Jim isn't a shiftless townsperson bumming tobacco off his neighbor rather than earn it. And compared to the conmen, who style themselves the King and the Duke, Jim is pure goodness.

Huck grows to see that goodness in Jim, and to reciprocate the affection and love. He wrestles with his conscience again and again, and realizes at last that he doesn't care what society says is right. He's going to help Jim and to hell with what's right! Which is extremely ironic from our modern point of view, because of COURSE slavery isn't right. But back then, it wasn't an "of course" thing at all.

I'm not sure what the episode with Tom Sawyer at the end is for, other than just pure comedy. Jim is being held by a family that turns out to relatives of Tom Sawyer, who has just arrived for a visit. There's a lovely bit of nonsense about Huck pretending to be Tom, and Tom pretending to be one of his brothers.

And together again, Tom hatches a crazy scheme to rescue Jim, involving smuggling things in to Jim, insisting that Jim tame rats and spiders and scratch messages on the walls like the Count of Monte Cristo, and other elaborate business all derived from Tom's reading and fertile imagination. It does illustrate how sheltered a life Tom has, compared to Huck, who knows just how high the stakes actually are for Jim. It's no longer a game for Huck and Jim, it's real life. Tom, we can see, still has a lot of growing up to do.

This book is a lot of things. It's fun to read, it's a great coming of age story, and it's a clear-eyed view of American culture of the mid 1800s. Yes, the attitudes can be offensive to modern readers, but they should be. It doesn't mean that's not how it was. Every American should read this book.