Thursday, July 15, 2010

Kidnapped


This book couldnae been mair enjoyable to a troubled man o’ sorrows as meself. Why, I couldnae put it down! Took me but a few hours – spread out o’er three days – to relive the adventures Davey Balfour had amongst them that wanted him dead and them that wanted t’ help him. ’Twas the best of reads, boys: quick and bright, a read to take ye out of ye troubles and ye troubled mind.

Perhaps ye never heard of the tale of Mr. Balfour. Perhaps this story never crossed yer bow as a bonny youngling. Now, I cannae do it justice; I’m a fair cry from the calibre of a Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. But I’ll give it the old honorary Scottish try.

Poor young David Balfour! Motherless and fatherless at the tender age of fifteen, the wee laddie leaves his guardian’s home to venture to the estate of his estranged uncle, with nae possessions upon his personage save a letter from his dear deceased dad. Turns out Uncle Ebenezer doesnae have our young hero’s best interests at heart. Uncle Ebenezer has an eye to keep the family fortunes in his own crooked and aged hands. Under pretense of visiting a lawyer in town to draw up papers with his uncle, Davey receives a painful blow to the noggin and wakes up in the belly of a ship, bound for enslavement in the New World.

For mair than a hunnerd and fifty fast-paced pages we trail young David as he survives mutiny and shipwreck. He befriends a wily brigand but nae wiles can prevent pursuit throughout the countryside, falsely accused it must be said, of murder. We suffer with our protagonist as he shivers sleepless under the cold moon and drizzle, and sizzles in the highland heat o’ the day. There’s swordplay, gunplay, cardplay and pipeplay as Davey struggles to return back to his homeland and his proper destiny, a perilous journey that takes nae less than three months nigh of Ebenezer’s treachery.

And, my friends, the best parts of Kidnapped are found to be the closing chapters, in which Mr. Balfour resecures his proper inheritance and brings wicked Uncle Ebenezer to justice – but, by using his wits and nae his fists. A very satisfying ending it was, lads! Indeed, ’twas the push the book needed to jump a grade from a high B to a solid A. Kidnapped, friends, is a great vacation read that hearkens me back to the time when I was a boy meself, and pirates and adventure called out to me at every corner and every turn of me neighborhood.

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