What Fiction are you reading this week, February 8, 2026?

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4. I also highly recommend My Jim by Nancy Rawles.

Perfect telling by left behind Sadie, Jim’s wife.

https://www.supersummary.com/my-jim/summary/

My Jim (2005), an historical novel for young adults by award-winning American author Nancy Rawles, is an account of Sadie Watson, who survives the horrors of slavery and the upheaval of Reconstruction. At the same time, it is a love story revolving on Sadie's relationship with Jim, who himself is something of a literary icon. He is the same Jim from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a runaway slave who rafts with Huck down the Mississippi River. Since Twain's novel doesn't elaborate on Jim's backstory, My Jim gives the character a rich history that highlights the barbarity of slavery, the beauty of first love, and the sacrifices one makes out of family responsibility.

The novel is told in three parts. In the first, titled "Marianne Libre," it is 1884, and Sadie Watson's granddaughter Marianne must choose whether to stay in Louisiana or move away to marry. Her grandfather, Papa Duban, is dead, but Marianne, close to her grandmother, does not want to leave Shreveport. Marianne's predicament compels Sadie to talk about Jim and her children Lizbeth and Jonnie.

The second section of My Jim, "Sadie Watson," is a series of stories highlighting the connections between several objects and formative events in Sadie's life. She tells Marianne the stories behind each object. The first is a knife, which Sadie got from her own mother, who had used it to perform medical treatments and healing work at a plantation where she was enslaved.

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