The life of a pioneer family stranded on a desert island must have been INCREDIBLY difficult, and yet this book made me want to find my own desert island when I was a child, and then build a tree-house and a rock-cavern fortress, and tame wild animals (including an ostrich to ride!) and make berries out of candles and bread out of ground-up roots, and all the other ba-JILLION things the Robinson family accomplished. (Warning: it's possible that this book isn't very realistic, since it might have taken an ARMY to create everything that's made here by a six-person family.)

The writing gets a tad preachy at times (the narrator-father's tone of "oh that's okay, I love you in spite of the appalling mistakes you make" borders on irritating), but I can skip all that when re-reading (as I do, constantly) and move right on to the how-to sections.