THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

Over nearly sixty years, this reviewer has come across myriad film, TV, stage, and dumbed-down print versions of this classic paean to childhood. Nonetheless, listening to this reading, I am struck by how fresh, how clever, how true it sounds. As narrator, Patrick Fraley has many virtues: a gift for voices and dialect, incredible and seemingly inexhaustible energy, an obvious and infectious delight in his material. He is too broad, too cartoony, too manic to represent the author’s tone satisfactorily. But he is never dull. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 02]