Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

In Treasure Island!!! by first-time novelist Sara Levine, our unnamed heroine/pirate swashbuckles her way through a job (that she hates), a boyfriend (who isn't really into boldness, turns out), her sister (fat), a very-expensive parrot named Little Richard (She wants him to squawk "Steer the boat, girlfriend!" but he really only gets as far as "boat!" before she feeds him mac-and-cheese poisoned with prescription meds, and he winds up in her mother's already over-crowded freezer), a best friend (also, like boyfriend, not big on boldness), and possibly one of the major veins that runs through said-sister's right hand. The last of these with a cake knife; the other damages requiring no weapon more dangerous than our heroine's deliciously misguided sense of self-importance.

However, if nothing in the paragraph above struck you as particularly funny, this probably isn't the book for you.

Levine's voice is true, our Heroine (henceforth in this review known as "H") truly abhorrent, and the mayhem that results is a well-spent summer afternoon.

Our tale begins when H's sister Adrianna leaves a library copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island lying around the house, after she decides not to read it with her third grade class ("I hate a book with no girls, sister Adrianna proclaims on the the second page.) H picks it up and decides to cleave to "boy hero Jim Hawkins' best qualities":

BOLDNESS
RESOLUTION
INDEPENDENCE
HORN-BLOWING


(Rebecca Barry's NYTimes review intelligently explicates what exactly "horn-blowing" just might be, but personally I recommend you just leave it up to your imagination. Trust me, you'll come up with a few things.)

To be honest, I frequently find picaresque novels tiresome, but Island!!! is smart, fast-paced, and allowed me to live quite happily within our heroine's warped and thwarted logic. As H plunders and pillages her way through her own life as a 25-year-old person patently without purpose or aim, her deeply misguided attempts at self-actualization may feel vaguely familiar to anyone who has been recently (or ever) a 25-year-old non-hornblowing person without purpose or aim. At one moment, as she sits in a doctor's office in pursuit of anxiety medication, her doctor notes, "You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown," and H replies:

"Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to one-self. It's not as though you do one bold thing and then you are bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep doing it, day in and day out. I don't know, can it ever be definitively accomplished?"

Can I get a "Steer the boat, girlfriend!"?

Levine's creation of a heroine so totally ridiculous and yet so recognizable is truly an accomplishment, and if the climax feels a little forced, this reader will forgive her, particularly after reading the flawlessly hilarious events of the final few pages. As you might imagine, nothing ends well for H, Adrianna, or the rest of the crew, but the novel will leave you laughing, and yes, perhaps seeking a little horn-blowing of your own, long after the few happy hours you will spend in its pages.