The Swiss Family Robinson (Illustrated Junior Library)

This 1812 novel was made into a 1960 movie that I remember as being pretty wholesomely Disneyfied. To my amazement, the actual book is equally unrealistically wholesome. The family, consisting of a Swiss mother, father, and four boys, are marooned on an uncharted island following a shipwreck in

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which they are abandoned by the captain and crew, never to be seen again. They embrace their fate with verve and good cheer, emptying the ship of all useful tools and supplies, and creating a mainly comfortable and well-fed life by dint of hard work and a cheerful outlook. The island must be dozens of square miles, supporting a variety of plants and animals that co-exist nowhere else on earth. There are kangaroos, lions, tigers, bears, buffalo, boa constrictors, ostriches and monkeys. The family has spent at least a decade on the island by the conclusion, never despairing of their fate or their isolation. The conclusion itself, after a decade of isolation in which they are only rarely threatened by the island predators, is in equal measure satisfying and unbelievable.

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