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jasonfurman 's review for:

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine
5.0

The second book I read this year with an exclamation mark in the title (and this one has three of them, which is three times as exciting as Swamplandia!), also one of the better books I've read this year--the best not to make any yearend best books lists (possibly because of its December publication date).

Treasure Island!!! is told in the first person by a narrator who is hilarious, quirky and as self-centered as she is completely unselfaware. She is a recent college graduate stuck in a series of dead end jobs, most recently working part-time in a "pet library" where people can rent pets for a few days at a time. The book begins with her discovery of the book Treasure Island and the story is about her increasing obsession with modeling her life after the hero, Jim Hawkins.

She reads Treasure Island over and over again the exclusion of everything else. She believes she can divine key life lessons and values from it that she puts on index cards and uses as a model for her own life, and she even goes so far as to buy a parrot. She finds so many layers to Treasure Island but hilariously seems to be blissfully unaware that it is a pirate story and to not know many of the basic aspects of what it is actually about.

Treasure Island!!! follows the standard downward spiral of an addiction story, but does it with over-the-top zaniness, wit, charm, and insight unintentionally shed on the people around her and herself. Every page sparkled and it was hard to put it down until reading to the very end.