Jim Davis
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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Publisher Description
Lively tale, told by the hero, of an English boy who is kidnapped by smugglers on the Devonshire coast in the early nineteenth century and passes through dangerous adventures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known perhaps for his poem "Sea-Fever" ("I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,/ And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by"), Masefield (1878 1967) produced this rattling yarn in 1911. The tale of a 12-year-old boy who falls in with smugglers could trace its lineage back to the swashbuckling stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and may find its modern-day offspring in such works as Iain Lawrence's High Seas trilogy. Jim, an orphan, is sent to live with relatives along the Devon coast. There he accidentally witnesses the deeds of a troop of night-riders, or smugglers, and becomes caught up in their shadowy, dangerous world of excise men, sea caves and illicit cargo. Forced to sign on for a voyage ("You've got to become one of us, so as if you give us away you'll be in the same boat," explains Marah Gorsuch, a mesmerizing, larger-than-life night-rider who might be friend or foe), Jim faces hurdle after hurdle. From a skirmish with a British frigate to a nightmarish chase on horseback to run-ins with soldiers and gypsies, the plot stays rip-roaring, and the atmospheric prose ("the strange moan of the snow-wind") supplies a polished, literary veneer. Ages 9-12.
