The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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


Jim Weiss is a wonderful storyteller, expansive and droll, with a gentle, ironic voice and a fine sense of timing. He also excels at character sketches, and listeners will be amused by his Tom, Aunt Polly, Becky, and Huck, among others. This production is a "storyteller's version" of the children's classic, though, so listeners should expect to move quickly from whitewashing the fence, to meeting Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher, to the graveyard scene. Weiss chooses only the highlights in this hour-long version. Though such brevity could distress loyal readers of the original, in the capable hands of Weiss, it may be a good way to tempt young listeners to read the book on their own. J.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine