There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and least religious girl in the school is the longest and most relentlessly pious.-Mark Twain

         The one character this book mainly follows is Tom Sawyer, a middle school boy who is extremely adventurous. The main conflict in this book is when Tom overhears a Native American named Joe talking about an important treasure he has hidden that Tom has vowed to find. This story takes place in a poorer town called St. Petersburg in Missouri in the 1820s. This conflict is happening because Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn, overheard Joe talking about said great treasure and devised a plan to find and steal it.

          This book affected me with its humor, it was very interesting and fun. It made me feel quite happy and amused. I definitely relate to the main character, Tom, in that we’re both middle school aged boys that are curious and like to adventure. This book definitely challenged me to be more thoughtful because of all the old English, I often had to stop and try to guess what certain words meant. It did change the view of the world in that life, while having many differences, had tons of similarities for a boy my age in the 1820s as oppose to 2018. I think the writing style for this book is quite unique and Mark Twain’s language and humor is not exactly reminding of any other authors. 

          In this day and age, one would be surprised that a book from the 1890s could keep one on the edge of their seat. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer really presented me with the large obstacle of contorting my mind to try and contemplate things in a way literature hasn’t really done for me. Our journey through The Adventures of Tom Sawyer quite nearly never had a dull moment and whenever you did start to lose attention in the reading, it always hooked you back in with a funny joke, snappy line or witty comeback. I finally learned that reading a book is not such a chore, but you need to find the right book for you in order for you to enjoy it at all. I really only started to read this book because, quite frankly, I had to. I am not the biggest reader in the world but I will always take on a challenge so I decided to power through this book. I am not the biggest fan of annotating and searching for prominent themes in books, I just like to enjoy it and read it but not much past that. This book in the end did however prove to be extremely funny and always entertaining so the annotating part wasn’t all that bad for this book. I could say many things about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but the one thing I can say with one hundred percent certainty is that the book was surprising-surprisingly  challenging, surprisingly fun, and surprisingly engulfing. If you had told me to read a book of this length and complexity a few weeks ago, I would have laughed and said no way, and this would remain true if it was the same length but without the humor and intelligence seeping out of this book. So in conclusion, not only did I love The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but it most certainly surprised me.