Kidnapped

Description

Set in Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion, young David Balfour leaves home and goes to the sinister House of Shaws. There, he finds himself kidnapped, the victim of his uncle's plot to cheat him of his inheritance, aboard a ship bound for America. He teams up with the Jacobite loyalist and spy, Alan Breck and they take on the ship's crew in a courageous battle but are soon shipwrecked. Later they find themselves suspected of the murder of 'Red Fox', a notorious enemy of the Jacobeans. They flee across the Highlands in a perilous journey back to David's home where he finally claims his inheritance. First serialised in 'Young Folks' magazine in 1886, and issued as a book later that year, Kidnapped provided much of the inspiration for John Buchan's 'The Thirty Nine Steps' and a generation of subsequent thrillers.

Robert Louis Stevenson is perhaps best-known today for 'Treasure Island' and 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'.

These inaugurate a new series of uniform classics, simplified so that little more than their bare essentials remain. Where there may be an excuse for a revision for young moderns of, say, the stilted quality of Defoe's Crusoe or a shortening of Kidnapped's lengthy descriptions - these are matters of individual taste. But it does seem that readers should be willing to take what the authors wrote originally. That case is strengthened by the bone-dryness of these revisions, all of which have been cut so extensively that little atmosphere remains, and the purpose-to introduce young readers to the classics-defeats itself. Attractive size and format and plentiful supplies of colored pictures make up for textual imperfections. Plastic covers. (Kirkus Reviews)