Review by New York Times Review
I'M partial, I confess, to a book with exclamation points in its title. It's the excitement, the urgency, the exuberance they bring to a page. Imagine if other people had used them: "War and Peace!!!" "The Breast!!!" You'd expect a completely different book. "Treasure Island!!!," Sara Levine's first novel, warrants its punctuation. Loyal in many ways to the language and the vigor of the original "Treasure Island" - Robert Louis Stevenson's 19th-century adventure classic - it is a farcical romp. An unnamed 25-year-old woman working at a dreary job reads Stevenson and decides to adopt the "core values" she finds in the book: Boldness! Resolution! Independence! Horn-blowing! (Having just reread the original "Treasure Island," I'm pretty sure the horn-blowing refers to the way Jim Hawkins, finally captured by pirates, triumphantly tells Long John Silver and his band of mutineers he has been behind their downfall every step of the way.) Levine is a wonderful storyteller with a vibrant voice. "Treasure Island!!!" is a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent. In her strong-willed protagonist, Levine has created a quintessential unreliable narrator, one who sees other people's flaws perfectly and almost never her own, who feints and dodges nimbly around her deep feelings and questionable mental stability like a sailor dancing the hornpipe. "I didn't want a psychiatrist. . . . I wanted a sample," she tells a doctor's receptionist who won't give her anti-anxiety pills. "Come on, I bet you have a closet full of starter packages. Please don't pretend Dr. Klug is the only doctor in America not in the drug companies' pocket!" "'I beg your pardon?' the receptionist said, as if my pardon were an ugly damp thing and the only possession I had. "'You heard what I said' (after I walked out)." It is hard to change a life, and Levine accurately portrays what happens when someone stirs up the secrets and lies we are often content to live with. Her narrator is not necessarily a sympathetic character. She refuses to work, expects everyone else to pay for her and is callous toward others, although beneath her jaunty exterior there are glimpses of deep sadness and insecurity. Like her role model Jim Hawkins she values independence, but Hawkins is thrust into real danger - facing murderous drunk pirates who fight to kill - and his resolute independence saves him from death. Levine's narrator's antagonists are mostly people who love her: sweet if distracted parents, a slightly overweight but kind sister toward whom the main character is often unforgiving, a gentle boyfriend who is also a good kisser. As she adopts her core values, swashbuckling through her life and theirs, she wreaks so much havoc that after a while the reader almost wants to shout: Empathy! Compassion! Harmonica playing! Kumbaya! I would argue this is Levine's point. What do we get from adventure stories? How do those values translate into a modern life? What does changing a life do to the people around us? FOR most of us, the real dangers we face come from ourselves. By making her protagonist a young woman with a history of tearing through therapists, and placing her in an environment as far as you can get from buccaneering, sea voyaging and cutlasses, she brings into sharp relief the desperation of suburban life. She also challenges the values we learn from tales of battle and independence, and the way we can use these values to rationalize and glorify rash behavior, or to avoid what's really brave. As her sister says during an intervention near the book's end, "Interdependent people are nicer. . . . Ever since you read the damn book, you've been gearing up to do something, right? Well, do something, sister! Take a risk! Go somewhere! Get a job! Try loving somebody - for real, I mean, not just house-playing!" It's a relevant statement, especially in an increasingly globalized culture. What do we lose when we pay more attention to our own Great Acts than to the people around us who support us? Maybe boldness, resolution and independence are overrated. Or maybe all by themselves, they are dubious values in the first place. Levine challenges the values of adventure tales, and the way we use them to justify our rash behavior. Rebecca Barry is the author of the novel "Later, at the Bar."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 8, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island remains vitally influential. Think treasure maps, the pirate with the wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder, bad franchise restaurants, and a flotilla of pirate movies. Fiction writers also pay homage. In Lighthousekeeping (2005), Jeanette Winterson puts a spin on Stevenson's classic boy's tale with her hero, Young Silver, an orphaned girl. First-time novelist Levine goes one better by having her unnamed protagonist, a woman in her twenties who is stupendously running amok, seize on Treasure Island as a self-help book. She swears to live by what she discerns as the book's core values, namely boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Her Treasure Island obsession engenders wildly disastrous and hilarious predicaments as she wreaks havoc at her place of tenuous employment, the Pet Library; acquires a cranky parrot; alienates her boyfriend; and moves back in with her parents and sister, a lonely third-grade teacher. Levine's desperate, mean, scamming, dangerously narcissistic, and sinking-fast protagonist ends up outing family secrets, committing a despicable crime, and generally terrorizing everyone, herself included. Levine marshals a swashbuckling and mordant imagination, tonic irony, cunning humor, and standup-comic timing to create one supersmart, topsy-turvy chick-lit satire.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Levine's first novel, an unnamed 25-year-old heroine, ambivalent about her boyfriend and unhappy in her job at the Pet Library (lending furry or finned companionship in lieu of books) adopts Treasure Island as a roadmap for life. Taking the book's "Core Values" of "boldness, resolution, independence, horn-blowing" to heart, she stops cleaning up after the pets, uses her boss's life-savings to acquire a parrot, and generally makes a huge pill of herself to everyone around her. With its three exclamation points, the novel promises irreverent fun, and certainly has an absurdist zaniness and charm, especially in the beginning. But instead of sympathizing with a slacker's efforts, however misguided, to change her life, we grow increasingly restless as it becomes clear that the main thing she's resolute about is never noticing the effect she has on friends and family. The way Levine's (Short Dark Oracles) narrator presents her actions and the cavalcade of misfortunes they bring as justified will make readers wonder if the author is sending up memoirs or 20-something self-involvement, but it doesn't feel like a sendup, and it's hard to get behind this heroine, who seems less humorously deluded than tiresome. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Boldness. Resolution. Independence. Horn blowing. These are the key qualities attributed to Jim Hawkins, protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, by the hapless, unnamed, 25-year-old female narrator of this debut novel by Levine. The underemployed slacker becomes ludicrously obsessed with Treasure Island, seeing in the novel a model of behavior that will permit her to throw off the shackles of her banal existence, starting with her part-time job in an animal-lending "pet library." Her first act is to steal cash from her employer to purchase a parrot that will sit on her shoulder spouting appropriate words of encouragement, Treasure Island-style, but that soon becomes her nemesis when it requires care and proves difficult to train. Our empathy-impaired narrator confuses irresponsibility with bravery and selfishness with self--sufficiency, and this results in a hilarious sequence of minor catastrophes befalling her friends and family, a circle of comically inept enablers. VERDICT Though it is hard to conceive of, let alone root for, such a morally bankrupt and emotionally stunted character, this highly original, farcical novel will keep you entertained in spite of (or more accurately, because of) its toxic narrator. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/11.]-Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
