A review by whatsthestorywishbone
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

4.0

I had watched this movie a LOT as a kid and was interested to see what the book was like. IMHO this is the original my side of the mountain/little house in the big woods. The family gets stranded on an island and have to use what they have to make a homestead and survive. It goes through how they built houses, canoes, what they used to make candles and clothes etc. It also has a bit of Gerald Durrell’s style in the sense that it sets up animal encounters just to teach you a little about the animals. This is NOT an action based book (unlike the movie there are NO pirates!). They don’t even find the girl until the last 30 min. But it 100% kept my little wanna be engineer’s attention (and mine). We did have a running joke where every time they would find something we would say “luckiest island/family ever!” Since the island is just made up of extremely useful stuff that one would never find on the same island. It does show its age too, of course. There is talk of “savages” and the mother never gets called by her name just “the mother.” She does all the cooking and sewing etc. of course. The religion is also super heavy handed and was very jarring at first, fortunately it lessened as the book progressed. It is what you get when you read the classics though, and I still think it was an interesting read despite its glaring faults.