A hilarious story about a woman who decides to base her life on Treasure Island, specifically what she sees as its 4 core values: BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE and HORN-BLOWING. The problems arise when her adherence to these goals is either somewhat twisted or outright non-existent: her BOLDNESS is typically a mask for selfishness and occasionally cruelty, her RESOLVE is stubbornness at best and at worst she just folds immediately, her INDEPENDENCE never really materializes as she ping pongs between parasitic relationships with her employer, her boyfriend, her parents, and a misguided attempt to dupe a former classmate to crash in her spare bedroom, and there fails to materialize an epic scene of HORN-BLOWING glory. Never-the-less, the farcical events play out in a funny and satisfying way, and ends with our heroine attempting her first real independent adventure (driving down the block to the hospital complete with a hand-drawn map to guide her famously terrible sense of direction). ( )

TOO MUCH TREASURE ISLAND!!! ( )

The main storyline is a good one, but I absolutely could not handle the main character’s attitude towards and treatment of animals. DNF’d at about 1/3. I should have quit sooner. ( )

It’s not about the self-absorbed young woman narrator who takes Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island as her life manual. It’s an audacious satire about self-improvement jammed with wacky black humor held at a whirring pitch by a talented young writer named Sara Levine.

Dr. Klug nodded. “You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown.”
“Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to oneself. It’s not as though you do one bold thing and then you are bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep on doing it, day in and day out. I don’t know, can it ever be definitively accomplished? I hardly rest, I hardly can!”

This horrifying and amusing book proves that in this new and enlightened age women can be just as massively self-absorbed as men-- with all the benefits and costs that implies. I liked the parrot especially. ( )