Adventures of Tom Sawyer Review

Adventures of Tom Sawyer I recently was assigned to read three books by the same author. It should be an author that I am not usually attached to. For the time being I had to drift away from the same old Tom Clancy type action novels. I picked one of the most famous comedic writers of the nineteenth century. His name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, commonly known by his pen name Mark Twain. When reading a collection of Mark Twain’s clever satires, where to start? With one of the most famous coming of age novels of all time Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Adventures of Tom Sawyer is about a young boy by the name of Tom Sawyer. Most of the book is just the telling of his childish shenanigans. In this book he does such things as hustle off work painting a fence. Playing hooky countless times, and becoming a pirate. Tom was a bad boy, he stole jam and sugar form the cupboards, skipped school, and started up smoking at an incredibly young age. Who did these things right there with…? The infamous Huck Finn. Huck is the son of a deceased mother, and a drunken father. So he is mostly on his own throughout the book. Tom never felt a conscious through all of the shenanigans. All until one day when the boys decided to build a raft and float down the Mississippi River. The boys find themselves on an island where they pretend to be pirates. Being a pirate separated them from the world. But once word spread that they were dead, a funeral was held. So the boys quickly went back to St. Petersburg, Missouri. When Tom saw all the people crying over his death at his own funeral… the shenanigans were put to a halt. Tom would later run a way to a cave and find chests of treasures with Huck.

I really liked this book because of the easy reading style I felt when reading it. Mark Twain used brilliant Missouri dialects that really hooked me into the setting. For the entire book I felt like I was right there with Tom and Huck in the sleepy Mississippi river town of St. Petersburg. Another reason I liked it was that the characters were so colorful. When Mark Twain was describing all of his characters, he went in to immense detail. Again, it was making me feel like I was really there in Missouri. Most books I read do not pull me into the setting like this one does.

There were not many things that I did not like about Mark Twain’s literary masterpiece. But one thing I think he could’ve changed about his book is to have the plot tie together a little bit better throughout he first couple of chapters. I’m saying that for the first couple of chapters it seems like Mark Twain was just writing short stories. But once the main action kicked in, the plot started to move right along.

To conclude this book review I will just sum up what I thought of Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I really enjoyed this book, its colorful dialogue, dialects, and characters made it a real page turner. After making a Frye Chart of the book, it is an about ninth grade read. But I would recommend this book to people that don’t usually like to read. This is because the southern dialects make it a pretty quick read.

Reading this book you will not trip up on any large words. All in all, a great book!