"Silver: Return to Treasure Island"

As promised, here's a review for one of the books I read earlier this year.

I think this is the one the most people wanted to hear about, so I decided to start with it.

"Silver: Return to Treasure Island" by Andrew Motion


Motion does a decent job of recreating the feel of "Treasure Island," but he in trying to incorporate the societal changes that occurred in the real world between the time when the two books are set, he loses some of the sense of adventure and the unknown that the original book invoked. In this book, there are fewer colorful characters to be found on the ship's crew, and the first-person narrative style, while well-done, removes some sense of suspense and mystery.

While it seems realistic for the narrator (the son of the original story's Jim Hawkins) to say, at points, "So-and-so told me this later," or, "Don't worry. So-and-so survived," or "So-and-so later suffered a terrible fate," doing so removes a lot of suspense for the reader. I often found myself rushing through bits of text just to get past what he already said would happen.

Still, I did enjoy the book and the journey back to Treasure Island. There was some swashbuckling and danger, and there were exotic animals and, yes, a few pirates to contend with.