By page 74 it was still just a laundry list of each day's discovery of new items from the island, or items recovered from the wrecked ship. No plot, no adventure. This may have passed my standards for a good read (probably not), but the thing that made me press the delete button on the Kindle with particular fury was the way in which Father Robinson was so damn knowledgable about every aspect of "savage" lifestyles and survival tactics. I mean, what middle-class clergyman from the Alps knows the exact proper way to halve a tropical gourd? Is it likely that this late-18th century minister from a mountain climate knows that a particular tree from a tropical climate can be used for making sewing thread, and also exactly how to make a navigable boat out of 8 barrels and a bunch of wrecked plywood? It strained the very limits of my suspended disbelief to the snapping point, and snap they did.

Delete from Kindle. ( )

Abridged to 190 pages

Review pending ( )

I often follow the course of audiobooks with my Kindle edition if I have one. In this case, I discovered at about a third of the way through the book that the two were no longer tracking. This wasn't just a case of different translations but they became two completely different plots! The audiobook, for example, had a chapter or two about a beached whale while in the Kindle text a British merchant ship was blown off course during a storm & met the Robinsons, carrying the father's notebook & family greetings back to Europe.

Blackstone Audio, who produced the audiobook edition I listened to, says: "Inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, this classic story of invention and adventure has fired the imaginations of readers since it first appeared in 1812. Freely translated over the years, with major sections excised and new subplots added, the novel is published here in its original English translation." (my underlining)

Certainly, the plot in the audiobook conforms to that given in synopsis on Wikipedia. However, I felt that the Kindle edition's language and plot both seemed more in keeping with the style & tone of the early nineteenth century. In any case, I enjoyed them both even though I hadn't anticipated reading 2 books for this one entry! ( )

Good family adventure story. ( )