The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This is a collection of the exciting adventures of the main character, Tom Sawyer. At the beginning of the book, we learn about the boy Tom Sawyer, a cunning and mischievous character on one side, and a decent and lovable one on the other. He lived with his aunt, an aging woman with a soft heart. Then as the book progresses, Tom involved himself in one big adventure, along with the character Huckleberry Finn, which is carried on to the end through a succession of short stories.

This big adventure began when Tom and Huckleberry take a daring visit to the local cemetery at midnight. Here both boys witness a murder, and also vow never to say a word about it—since the criminal was a notorious, vicious fellow. Next to come Tom and Huck decide to go treasure hunting, and they eventually got into a real trail. Tom and Huck, and another boy, go pirating in an uninhabited nearby island, and back at the village they were declared as dead. Getting back to the village there was a party for one of Tom’s classmates, and the excitement built up to the point of Tom and this classmate of his almost starving inside a mountainous cave. All these stories had their ups and downs, their climaxes and their conclusions, but one thing for sure is that they were all very interesting and exciting.

The book is a combination of loosely-related short stories, each story having its own special moral. But after reading the book one moral stuck in my mind more conspicuously: To get somebody interested in something you must make that thing seem hard to get. This is about a story at the beginning of the book. Tom was given the punishment of whitewashing the front gates of their house. He considered this an arduous and disparaging task—his friends would tease him since they didn’t have to work. But Tom, as always, developed a bright idea, which worked more than perfectly on each of his friends that came by.

April 20, 2015. Review initially written in 1982. Novel first published in 1949, this Longman edition being published in 1979. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).