Treasure Island!!!

The narrator may find Robert Louis Stevenson's famous book about pirates a treasure, but her family and friends want it buried. Sara Levine's novel finds a woman who dreams of adventure while living a humdrum existence adopting the book as a guide to life. Emily Durante reads the first-person account with a thin, whiny voice. Her tone has just enough awareness to let readers know that her protagonist and the other characters have very different views on her new lease on life. The results are comic at first but take more serious turns involving her sister's love life, a death, and an injury. This book is often annoying and funny at the same time. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

November 7, 2011
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.