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matildazq 's review for:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
4.0

Reading this was a product of having no brain or emotional space to pick something to read; none of my holds were close to available from the library.

I had started this a few years ago (actually—it was almost certainly MANY years ago), and didn't finish it. I'm curious as to what derailed me, because I almost never bail on a book, once I've started, and it certainly wasn't that I didn't like it.

I started over, and this is enjoyable. I've seen a zillion adaptations of this and things that borrow freely from it, so it was interesting to delve into the OG. It delivers on what one expects: high adventure, super-masculine, and so on. The narrative structure takes some getting used to, but the episodic character is very well done. Even when the text explicitly indicates how certain aspects of the plot will turn out, it's still lively and engaging enough to support the suspension of disbelief.

I don't really have anything deep to say about this, other than to observe that it is certainly much more overtly violent and rather scary than I was expecting it to be; and Long John Silver is quite the charismatic sociopath. Not the first, I'm sure, but when people talk about Highsmith's Ripley, Hannibal Lector, and so on, LJS is an important part of that template.