Book review: The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

by: Alex Gazis

            In the book by Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the main character ‘Tom Sawyer’ goes through many extremely comical yet mischievous and childish adventures.  For example the book starts out with Tom hiding from his aunt while being smothered with jam all over his face.  When Aunt Polly finds him he wants to punish him, but Tom goes to his normal mischievous ways and tricked her into looking somewhere else as he ran off.  Tom is accompanied by his half-brother, Sid, and a slave named Jim in his Aunt’s home.  Sid is constantly ruining Tom’s schemes to participate in normal childish games, like how he catches that Tom had skipped school to go swimming, when Tom would have gotten away with it if Sid hadn’t told Aunt Polly about it.  Aunt Polly wanted to find a new type of punishment for him this time and asked him to whitewash the fence.  Tom started to work, but then started to think of ways to complete the tasks faster as his friends walked by.  He thought he could just make his friends white wash the fence if he pretended it was a fun thing to do and he ended up actually making a profit on this work because so many people wanted to join in the fun.  By the afternoon Aunt Polly is happy with Tom’s job on the fence and lets him go out and play.  Tom has many adventures like these throughout the book, but his main companion along the book is his good friend Huckleberry Finn whom was frowned upon by most adults in the town since his father was the town drunk and he was a free boy, like a stray dog, but Tom liked this freedom and befriended Huck.  Also Tom noticed a girl named Becky Thatcher, the young daughter of Judge Thatcher.  After a few more embarrassing adventures Tom gets his chance to talk with Becky.  But before this he had stopped to talk with his friend, whom Tom wants to be like, Huck who was carrying a dead cat, which he said was used to remove warts.  This turned into an adventure for Tom and Huck to later discover the evil man Injun Joe.  But back at school Tom is late because of his chat with Huck and Tom gets in trouble and is forced by his teacher to sit with Becky Thatcher.  This is where the two of them fall in love.  Twain uses the Injun Joe as a conflict to Tom and Huck as they see him murder a man and blame it on a man who they knew means no harm.  What Tom and Huck do with this knowledge really opens up this story.  Twain uses balance of romance and adventure in the stories with Injun Joe and Becky.  Tom’s adventures continue throughout the rest of the novel until in the end it comes down to Injun Joe, Becky, and Tom.  I think this book was a really good book of how each adventure leads to the ending, and there is always a feeling of suspense.