The story of John Rolfe's courtship of Pocahontas during the founding of Jamestown in 1607 has been told by seemingly everyone, from Walt Disney to William T. Vollmann, so you might think a wise novelist would stay away from such well-trod territory. Thankfully, though, Matthew Sharpe hasn't, as his novel Jamestown is fiercely entertaining even as it deconstructs popular myths and applies the oft-told story to the present day.

It's post-apocalypse, 2008, and Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, supplies are scarce, and it's contingent on Manhattanite Johnny Rolfe and his companions to head south in an armored bus and find oil. Instead they find Indians. After some initial getting-to-know-you, the colonists are promptly fed, bathed, stroked, and then beset upon by a rain of arrows. As Rolfe and company attempt to fulfill their corporate-mandated duties without further punctures, Sharpe follows the contours of the original Jamestown colony blow-by-blow, even incorporating language from historical correspondence. But this is not a historical novel: Pocahontas and Rolfe meet via blog-type messages beamed from handheld devices, the Indians are actually Southerners who survived the apocalypse, and the colonists' leader is an authoritarian corporate climber trying to impress his boss.

Throughout the novel, Sharpe skillfully mixes the politics of 1607 with post-9/11 cynicism, present-day technology, uniquely American questions, and pop culture's doomsday visions. The result is an extremely violent, cartoonish world (check the carnivorous bunnies) in which dirty jokes sit beside references to Hegel. Sharpe's adroit plotting holds it together, and by any standard — intelligence, style, enjoyment — Jamestown stands out in the (lately quite crowded) post-apocalyptic genre.

-Scott Esposito