A review by quoththegirl
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

3.0

I was a huge ERB fan as a kid, but somehow I never read the first Tarzan book. I saw it for cheap at The Reader's Corner and snatched it up a few weeks ago. Unlike some of the authors I enjoyed as a youngster, Burroughs doesn't disappoint on a reread as an adult. He makes no claim to literary greatness; he just lays the story in front of you and says, "Here, this is a pretty exciting adventure tale. Knock yourself out." And they are fantastically exciting. My only problem with Tarzan was the casual, implicit (or explicit) racism that reared its head periodically. I'm kind of surprised you could get away with that in literature, even in 1912, and it yanks you out of the story rather jarringly to run straight into it like that. Still, the rest of it was thoroughly enjoyable, and I'll probably hunt down a few of the many sequels someday.