Imagine a modern-day retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with a teenage girl and a very pregnant young Mexican as the main characters. Thats the gist of Matthew Olshan's brilliant literary debut, Finn: a novel.The books narrator is Chloe Wilder, a quiet girl, part tomboy, part survivor. Rescued from a murderous life with her mother, Chloe lives with her grandparents in the cocoon of a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. For the first time in her life, things are steady, safeand stifling.Enter Silvia Morales, the grandparents maid. Silvia is an illegal immigrant, but thats not her only secret: shes also pregnant, a transgression which gets her kicked out of the house. Not long after, Chloe is torn from her quiet life, too, and forced to live on the run.While Finn: a novel is about Chloe and Silvias comic mishaps on the roadand their brushes with real dangerits also a dark portrait of modern America, where smug suburbanites live minutes away from the wilderness of inner cities, and once-mighty rivers meander under superhighways. Young people will read Finn: a novel as a good, old-fashioned adventure story. Adults will read it as nuanced social criticism. But virtually every reader will see in Chloe Wilder a resilient, funny, and complex heroine for our time. Look for Finn: a novel to generate some of the same controversy that still surrounds Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the sixth most banned book in the United States in the year 2000. The characterization of Silvia Morales, Chloe Wilders Latina partner in crime, is likely to spark an up-to-the-minute debate about racism in America. Olshans novel raises the question: what will it take for young people to unlearn their nations unconscious racial hostility?Author Matthew Olshan was educated at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford Universities. He is a freelance writer and producer. A native of Washington, DC, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and daughter. Finn: a novel is his first published work of fiction.

 

There are 180 pages in this book. It is a novel. This book was published 2001 by Bancroft Press .

Matthew Olshan is author of the critically acclaimed picture book The Mighty Lalouche , also illustrated by Sophie Blackall, as well as the adult novel Marshlands . He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.