Tom Sawyer Abroad

Lovers of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) will find in this less known sequel to Mark Twain's masterpieces the same pleasure and enjoyment. The narrative follows Tom, Huck and their friend Jim, the newly-freed slave, throughout their unintentional journey into the African desert. In the beginning of the story, the three youngsters are kidnapped by an unhinged inventor who forcibly takes them on the board of his curious airship to an unknown destination. As the strange inventor falls overboard due to a sudden sea storm, the boys have to manage to steer the uncontrollable balloon on their own. They ultimately find themselves amid the Sahara where they have to face a variety of dangers with which they have never been familiar before. Witty discussions, juvenile vocabulary and humorous quips are interspersed with the boys' continuous struggles with armed robbers, lions, thirst and sand storms. As in most of Twain's works, the story's events are not as important as the humorous dialogues, the laughable social commentary and the rhetorical labyrinths spun by Huck as a first-person narrator.