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A review by the_magpie_reader
The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne
2.0
"The Coral Island" by R.M. Ballantyne was quite a disappointment to me.
It's not that I disliked this book because of all the racism and the scientific inaccuracies: I read a lot of 19th-century novels and I'm perfectly capable of enjoying them even though they reflect a different value system than mine and even though the pseudo-scientific explanations in them are based on the author's imagination rather than on solid research. So no, it's not the racism or the crazy pseudo-biology. It's the boredom!
It's hard to bore your reader when you are writing about shipwrecked sailors, deserted islands, pirate ships, and all sorts of adventures, yet R.M. Ballantyne somehow managed to bore me half to death while writing about my favourite subjects for a novel.
The three main characters are not only completely flat, but also perfectly obnoxious. For the first several chapters there's no conflict at all, and even the most exciting adventures, later on, are described in such a pompous, wordy writing style that I was reduced to tears by my uncontrolled yawning.
This is definitely the worst adventure novel I've read in a long while.
It's not that I disliked this book because of all the racism and the scientific inaccuracies: I read a lot of 19th-century novels and I'm perfectly capable of enjoying them even though they reflect a different value system than mine and even though the pseudo-scientific explanations in them are based on the author's imagination rather than on solid research. So no, it's not the racism or the crazy pseudo-biology. It's the boredom!
It's hard to bore your reader when you are writing about shipwrecked sailors, deserted islands, pirate ships, and all sorts of adventures, yet R.M. Ballantyne somehow managed to bore me half to death while writing about my favourite subjects for a novel.
The three main characters are not only completely flat, but also perfectly obnoxious. For the first several chapters there's no conflict at all, and even the most exciting adventures, later on, are described in such a pompous, wordy writing style that I was reduced to tears by my uncontrolled yawning.
This is definitely the worst adventure novel I've read in a long while.