My sister said it was an adventure book and that the trouble with adventure books was "all action and no feeling." She said that the book had the moral complexity of a baseball game and that her hand would force no nine-year-old girl to read it.
These two sentences end the first page of Sara Levine's first novel, Treasure Island!!! It is the story of a woman whose life has been anything but an adventure, but who finds adventure within the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and decides to live her life according to the principles she derives from his work. Read Levine's book to discover these principles for yourself.
The sister's description of the adventure book as having "the moral complexity of a baseball game" made it necessary for me to buy the book and read on to page two. The description is fun, engaging, meaningful, and frankly, funny enough to make me smile.
From a critical viewpoint, while Levine could have chosen just about anything devoid of moral complexity to complete this description--a doorbell, a novel's dustjacket, the nightstand upon which you bury books you don't intend to finish--the choice to reference the baseball game places the novel within a particularly American context. The hero of the novel, a college graduate who has moved from odd job to odd job, including ice-cream scooper and pet librarian (you'll see), has a bit of the bootstrapper in her, the rugged individualist, even a bit of the entrepreneur. So the choice is smart as well as funny.
Levine, Sara. Treasure Island!!! New York: Europa Editions, 2012.
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