Shelly's Book Blog

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of those classics I had never read, so when our library received a Big Read grant for this novel, I decided to finally see for myself why it is so beloved. As I read, I laughed out loud many times. Mark Twain is such a skilled writer and humorist, I guess I was bound to enjoy this book. It was kind of strange to read in the book about adventures I had known about seemingly all my life, such as Tom's island (think Disneyland) and the scene where Tom is supposed to whitewash the fence but manages not only to get other kids to do it but to have them pay him for the "privledge".

One cannot help but become a bit nostalgic for "the good old days" when reading a classic like Tom Sawyer. I put that phrase in quotation marks for good reason, though. There was a lot of bad to the "good old days" in which this book was written. Slavery, of course, rears its ugly head even in this book of innocoent childhood adventure. I noticed that the characters seemed to be much more superstitious, too (which I think Twain was gently satirizing). Still, the focus is on Tom and Huck Finn and their rascally ways and I thoroughly enjoyed Twain's witty prose.