The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Children's Literature - Mary Bowman-Kruhm Ed.D.

Throughout the book's nineteen chapters of this excellent adaptation, Jan Fields writes with a tone and style appropriate for a retelling of Defoe's classic story about a young man who loves the sea so much that he defies his father and chooses a seafaring life. After several adventures, Robinson Crusoe's ship encounters a terrible storm and becomes stuck on a sandbar. The crew boards the remaining lifeboat, but a wave sweeps his comrades away. While Crusoe is left a cache of supplies from the ship, he is marooned on an isolated island near the Barbados. Crusoe's creative solutions to the problems he faces living without human companionship for 28 years are detailed and include taming goats, growing barley to make into cakes, and outfitting himself in animal skins. Black-and-white drawings give a sense of Crusoe's aging on the island. Finally, he meets another person. Crusoe helps a prisoner escape from killers invading his island, and the two become companions. Because he rescues the man on Friday, that is what Crusoe calls him. The pace picks up considerably during the last four chapters. One adventure rapidly follows another, leaving little chance for reflecting upon or even visualizing Crusoe's predicaments, but the earlier part of his story is so well told that this a minor issue. Obviously much of the original is omitted, but the story is well told and the story is improved without some of the material (e.g., his views on religion). This book is intended for middle-grade students, and has a large font and white space on the pages. However, the book would be an excellent supplemental text for an inclusion class that is reading the original or a class studying a unit on survival. It would be an excellent read-aloud for introducing young children to the classics. Reviewer: Mary Bowman-Kruhm, Ed.D.

From Barnes & Noble

Based on a real-life incident, Robinson Crusoe tells the story of a young man who yearns to escape the mundane world and set sail for a life of adventure in faraway places. Defying his father's wishes he leaves on board a ship, then finds himself marooned on a tropical island where he wrestles with his fate and ponders the nature of God and man. The world has gotten smaller since Defoe penned his novel, but the human imagination still looms large. So even in today's world of space exploration, this story of an ordinary man struggling to survive has not lost its appeal for modern readers.