Finn

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. That's the gist of Matthew Olshan's brilliant literary debut, Finn: a novel.

The book's 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, safe-and stifling.

Enter Silvia Morales, the grandparents' maid. Silvia is an illegal immigrant, but that's not her only secret: she's 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 Silvia's comic mishaps on the road-and their brushes with real danger-it's 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 Wilder's Latina "partner in crime," is likely to spark an up-to-the-minute debate about racism in America. Olshan's novel raises the question: what will it take for young people to unlearn their nation's unconscious racial hostility?

Booklist

Set in a thoroughly modern context, this inventive, affectionate homage to Mark Twain's classic about Huck Finn clearly illustrates that prejudice still affects human understanding, behavior, and language. Like Huck's journey, Chloe's is both a multilayered story of personal growth and an entertaining, provocative satire that explores society, culture, and humankind's occasionally ironic notions of freedom and progress.

Olshan's creative prose shines in Chloe's sharp, intimate, funny narrative, which is filled with vivid observations, philosophical musings, and insights into the world and people around her. Teens who have read Twain's book will appreciate Olshan's direct references and parallels; those who haven't will like the action and the heroine's resourcefulness. The book's satire and cynicism may create controversy and strike some readers as harsh, but the novel effectively raises awareness of contemporary social concerns, and, like the classic, is certain to invite both thought and discussion.

Matthew Olshan was educated at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford Universities. He is a freelance writer and producer. A native of Washington, D.C., he lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and daughter. Finn: a Novel is his first published work of fiction.