The sun shines on Tom Sawyer. The idealized childhood of this fictional hero, based on Mark Twain's own early life along the banks of the Mississippi, is filled with robust good humor and high-spirited adventures. Yet there is also an in-depth experience of the central South of the 1840s - its dialects, superstitions, and social values. While romping through fun-filled fantasy, Tom Sawyer shows how morally complicated real life can be. This reading of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is especially notable for the virtuoso performance of actor Patrick Fraley. Crafting 36 authentic "voices" to represent the wide range of Twain's delightful characters, Fraley proves his storytelling mastery. Share in the sunshine with Tom whitewashing the fence and hear why this is one of the world's best-known and best-loved books, appealing to all ages.
Over nearly sixty years, this reviewer has come across myriad film, TV, stage, and dumbed-down print versions of this classic paean to childhood. Nonetheless, listening to this reading, I am struck by how fresh, how clever, how true it sounds. As narrator, Patrick Fraley has many virtues: a gift for voices and dialect, incredible and seemingly inexhaustible energy, an obvious and infectious delight in his material. He is too broad, too cartoony, too manic to represent the author's tone satisfactorily. But he is never dull. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
AudioFile...
"As narrator, Patrick Fraley has many virtues: a gift for voices and dialect, incredible and seemingly inexhaustible energy, an obvious and infectious delight in his material."
About the Author
Mark Twain (1835-1910), one of the most admired writers of all time, published this work in the U.S.A. in 1885, following Innocents Abroad (1869) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
