The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Tom's adventures continue to be engaging, funny, innocent, and insightful all at the same time, and are full of great characters living their nineteenth-century lives with all of America's confidence and wide-open possibilities. I wish I could report to you that William Dufris, usually a very reliable narrator, is up to the task, but alas, I cannot. Dufris adopts a homey, meandering voice that mostly sounds tentative and doesn't match Twain's energy. He tries to liven up a bit during dialogue scenes, but the character voices he uses for Tom and Huck don't have much depth. This is a serviceable version of the book, and if you haven't read it in a while, it's worth a listen. But it's not the classic version it could be. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, 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