But remember, this is a novel of its time and culture. Granted, the idea of racing on the back of an ostrich is appealing to the adventurous child, I think no modern reader-young or old-would be able to get past the Robinson family’s habit of killing an animal in order to determine what it is: “Oh, look, what an amazing, elegant, beautiful creature: let’s kill it.” And while the notion of building an elaborate treehouse from the ground up, so to speak, really does appeal to the engineer in all of us, the glory of bamboo-punk does not outweigh the boredom resulting from the stilted writing and the episodic narrative. Kingston in 1879, which is the edition I read. Or rather, as it was translated into English by William H.G. It speaks to the heart of the child who built elaborate road systems for little cars, and dreamed of a toy train set, just for all those fabulous track junctions… Not so the novel as it was written. For the story of the Swiss Family Robinson-a family marooned on an island who MacGyver together a fabulous treetop home-is the stuff of magical imagination. This might be unfair, but the novel stands out for me as one of the great literary disappointments of my life. I cannot bring myself to read it again to review it, so what follows are my recollections from reading it oh-so-many years ago. While it is (or at least was) a classic of European children’s literature, it has certainly not aged well.
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