Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Tom Sawyer Abroad

When I was growing up, we had a 3-books-in-1-volume set of Tom Sawyer tales. The first one was the classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I read it, laughed myself silly over some of the classic scenes, like Tom whitewashing the fence and feeding the cat his medicine, and started in on the two sequels with a high sense of anticipation. And they fell completely flat.

This is a mildly interesting kids' adventure tale, with Tom, Huck and Jim sailing over Africa in a hot air balloon. The characters are sillier and the story lacks the kind of insight you might have expected. Mark Twain was in dire financial straits by this time, and I think he churned out these sequels without putting a lot of thought into them. Too bad.