Treasure Island follows young Jim Hawkins in a search for treasure, a search which sees him and his companions facing off against a band of cut-throat pirates. This story has been frequently dramatized and has seen its share of retelling on the big screen. It has influenced most pirate stories that have been popular in film and literature since.

Stevenson writes strong characters who run the gamut from heroic to villainous to a shade of gray in-between. Each of his characters is carefully designed, and even characters who don’t occupy many pages of the story are realistic and fit well into the narrative.

Adventure is plentiful in this book, but adventure sequences are wedged between long stretches in which not much happens. The pirates’ conversations are often hard to follow due to their accents and use of unfamiliar terms, and even the proper gentlemen speak in a dialect that is at times difficult to understand. This use of archaic dialect is to be expected because the book is well over a hundred years old, but it will make a seriously slow and difficult read for most children. The plot is too predictable to hold the attention of most adults, so this book falls into a limbo where the writing is too complex for the audience most likely to find the story enjoyable.

Content Analysis:

Profanity/Language:  1 religious exclamation.  Note: brief use of  “Negro” and Negress” in the historical context (not tallied).

Violence/Gore:  Characters attack each other in minor ways, such as pinching or grabbing a few times; a few reports of a hanging; report of people made to walk the plank; report of sunken ships; marooning is mentioned as a punishment; a few reports of murders; report of a fist-fight; report of war wounds in the past; a description of hanged men, along with a speculation that a character will also be hung; a character mentions that he’d like to keel-haul another; character threatens another with a knife; characters discuss a plan to kill others; a few verbal threats; a character threatens to shoot another; characters are abandoned on an island; a few characters have scars from prior wounds, such as missing digits or limbs; characters are deathly ill; an adult wishes that he’d blinded a child; characters hear the distant screams of a dying man a couple of times; a residence is ransacked; a book is intentionally torn; a swordfight results in deep cuts; a character finds a human skeleton; a character is pinned to a piece of wood by a knife; a character has a debilitating medical emergency; bleeding is used as a medical treatment; a few characters die of natural causes; an adult threatens to break a boy’s arm; a character is trampled to death by a horse; a character kills another by bludgeoning and stabbing him; a fight scene using cannons and gunfire in which characters are killed and a boat sinks (very little blood described); a character hears a scuffle, and it is implied that one of the combatants is either killed or incapacitated; a few fights using guns, knives and swords result in deaths and serious wounds, with minimal details of the injuries; characters are forced to stay in the same place with dead bodies from a previous battle on a few occasions; characters wrestle and struggle with each other; a character discovers a dead body and badly wounded person.

Sex/Nudity:  None

Mature Subject Matter:

 Alcoholism; death (family member); piracy; mutiny; theft.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

Adults drink rum, wine, and ale, with other liquor mentioned; adults and minors drink brandy and grog; a frequently repeated song mentions “a bottle of rum”; a character says that he “wants drugs”, but he does not get them and the sort of drugs is not detailed; adults smoke pipes and use tobacco; a character carries a snuff box.