Published in 2011
172 pages
Sara Levine teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Nerve, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and other magazines. She won a 2008 Bridport Prize for Fiction, a Special Mention in The Pushcart Anthology, and three citations in The Best American Essays. Her writing has been anthologized in Best of Fence: The First Nine Years and The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present.
What is this book about?
When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold?
Convinced that Stevenson’s book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she’d originally planned.
Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice-intelligent, perverse, relentlessly self- extricating, and funny.
