One of my favourite books is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I first read at age eleven! (I'd also read the Classics Illustrated comic book version.) The edition I read had fine illustrations by Donald Mackay.
The novel was controversial even when it was first published back in the 1880s, mostly because its dialect English was seen as "vulgar. But the glory of the book is in the authenticity of its language! I know that its use of the N-word still causes controversy--a recent edition changed the word "nigger" to "slave everywhere in the text!--but it makes a profound anti-racist statement.
Just the other day at my Reading Out Loud Meetup group, where the monthly topic was humor, I read the part in the book where the King grifter goes to a religious revival meeting, tells an outrageous lie about being a reformed pirate going back to the Indian Ocean to reform the other pirates, and collects lots of money. Mark Twain took a rather cynical view of people.... He came from Missouri, "the Show Me state," and he certainly exhibited skepticism!
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