by Sara Levine
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Dec 2011
176 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold?
Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she'd originally planned.
Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice-intelligent, perverse, relentlessly self-extricating, and funny.
Paperback original
"A subversive and often funny exercise in style, voice in particular, with a narrator who pushes unreliability to an extreme... This novel might have something to say about gender roles, the relationship between literature and life, or other standard themes, but mainly it's just a hoot." - Kirkus Reviews
"The way Levine's... narrator presents her actions and the cavalcade of misfortunes they bring as justified will make readers wonder if the author is sending up memoirs or 20-something self-involvement, but it doesn't feel like a sendup, and it's hard to get behind this heroine, who seems less humorously deluded than tiresome." - Publishers Weekly
"This highly original, farcical novel will keep you entertained in spite of (or more accurately, because of) its toxic narrator." - Library Journal
This information about Treasure Island!!! was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sara Levine teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and other magazines. She won a 2008 Bridport Prize for Fiction, a Special Mention in The Pushcart Anthology, and three citations in The Best American Essays. Her writing has been anthologized in Best of Fence: The First Nine Years and The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present.
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