I don't know what I expected from this, but... more, maybe? I haven't read it before, or Huckleberry Finn for that matter, and all I knew was a kind of nebulous idea of the books as classics, and that the latter had a river in it. I'll read that soon enough, I expect. But for all Tom Sawyer is a likeable enough book - and I did like it - I'm finding it hard to see how it ascended to classic status, to be honest. I know nothing about the history and publication of it, but it puts me in the mind of Dickens... so episodic that it could almost have been written in installments for a newspaper.

That said, the children here do come across like children, which is more than can be said for some kids in classics. They are imaginative, adventurous, petty, spiteful, both selfish and compassionate, and they are perhaps stronger than the plot, which is essentially a series of boys-own adventures in which the crucial parts (escaping the cave, confessing to lawyer) tend to get skipped in favour of a retroactive glossing over. That was slightly irritating, but there's still a real sort of nostalgia present here. Which is slightly odd, as I've never been in the same kind of setting or community, but I suppose some things trickle through.