Johann Rudolf Wyss (1782–1830)

DNF. I just couldn't continue with this book. On every second page the boys are killing another animal, shooting with guns. Not even out of necessity for food, just because they were scared or so. They are all very trigger happy. The father is also always preaching and the life lessons are really on the nose. The idea of a family stranded on an island, building a tree house and having adventures, is such a good idea, but the way it is written in this book is really not for me.

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 show more 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. show less

Have you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and wished for more of the frontier DIY bits and less of the annoying family sweetness? Well, this is that book, with more old-time engineering and a whole lot more hunting. If this book were a magazine it'd be the love child of Popular Mechanics and Field & Stream, and for some people that's perfect. To me, it felt like a nature documentary: it got off to a fascinating start but before long it was just animals killing animals, show more over and over. The only thing that got me through the last two out of nine sections of the audiobook was an urgent knitting project. Then at the end the story flashes forward ten years, which is a bit more bearable. Well, that's over with. show less

A very curious reading from a historical perspective. What would life on an uninhabited island in the southern seas look like from a 19th century man's perspective? Apparently it would mostly consist of killing and/or taming any wild beast imaginable from all five continents. On that island the brave Robinson family encounters penguins, lions, walruses, kangaroos, ostriches, lions, elephants, bears, etc. I believe the learned Mr. Wyss felt an immense pressure to be just and not to overlook show more any creature he may have had a fortune to come across in his studies.

A little spoiler to add drama: some beasts were killed, while riding one of the aforementioned ostriches. show less