Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Cliffs Complete)

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As a classroom teacher myself with 35 years experience, this review is from the teacher's perspective. I have been teaching "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for the past thirty years, and during that time have accumulated numerous reference materials to aid in my understanding of this most American of classic novels. Let's start with the claims on the front cover:

"The Complete Original Work" - Yes, this is the complete, unabridged addition of the novel. Unfortunately, it includes fewer than a half dozen of the original E.W. Kemble illustrations.

"Expert Commentary" - Richard P. Wasowski has a masters degree and taches literature and writing at Ashland High School in Ohio. He groups the novel's 43 chapters into twenty-one clusters. At the end of each of these clusters, he provides insightful commentary covering both plot and theme. The average length of this commentary is a single page. A couple times it is two pages, but many times it is only a half page.

"Notes and Definitions" - There are brief notes at the beginning of each chapter. These essentially are a quick summary of what to expect in the chapter before actually reading. (I'm not sure of the advantage of these summaries. In my mind, they are plot spoilers for the first-time reader.) The definitions, on the other hand, are a different story. These are very helpful. I wish the edition that I use in the classroom (see my review for ISBN 0-486-44322-1) had this feature. This novel was published more than a hundred years ago, and words that every reader would have known then, are too obscure for most of today's reader to know. Here's the list of words just from chapter 1: sugar-hogshead, victuals, snuff, middling hard, pecking. In addition to definitions located on the outside margins of the page, each word is boldfaced in the text.

"Exclusive Character Map" - This one's a stretch. On page 14, there is a list of eight of the characters and a chart to show how they connect to Huck, but this is of marginal help. There is no comprehensive list of all of the characters.

However, what IS informative are pages 1-13. Here we are provided with important information on Mark Twain and the novel itself which provides some historical background to enhance the appreciation and understanding of "Huck Finn."

At the conclusion of the novel, there is a review test that includes both objective and short answer questions (and an answer key). There is also a list of discussion questions and activities.

Bottom line? This would be an excellent teacher resource for someone who has never taught "Huck Finn" before. However, I would not recommend it for student use. Too many of them would skip the text and simply read the notes and the commentary, and doesn't that defeat the purpose of reading a novel? Could some of my struggling students benefit from this? If they used it as a resource instead of an alternative to actually reading it, then, yes. But let's be real, most of my students would be looking for shortcuts, not extra reading.

Cliff Notes are great, especially when its the first time you are teaching a novel you are not familiar with. Its good to use as a reference and it has commentary for each set of chapters.

It provides the entire text of Huckleberry Finn, eliminating the need for the actual book. Plus, it contains helpful side definitions and commentary and the end, eliminating need for Cliffsnotes or Spark Notes. Additionally, a review quiz, essay topics, and additional resources at the end strengthen understanding of the book.