Stars: 4
Review by: Mandy Apgar
Two things
made this a four: Esmeralda (the maid of Jane) being characterized as an
idiotic "Mammy" stereotype. I half expected her to start wailing that
she couldn't "birth no babies" in between her
frequent fainting fits. Two, if Jane's father had said "tut, tut" once
more I would've thrown this book out a window. Elsewise it was a lot
better than I expected. I always assumed this was a novel for juniors
but the level of violence and thematic elements
in here make it a lot darker - Lord and Lady Greystoke are marooned on
an island and shortly deliver a son. After he is a year old both are
dead and the boy is raised by Kala, the ape, who names him "Tarzan" as
that means "White-Skin" in her tongue. Fiercely
protective and a positive figure, Kala trains her charge well and when
he is about 19, 20 Kala dies when attacked by a local tribe of African
native humans. Tarzan predictably goes bonkers and starts bumping them
off at night and stealing their goods, all the
while teaching himself how to read and write via books found in the old
residence his parents constructed. A party containing Jane Porter, her
irritating father, Esmeralda, the Lord of Greystoke (conveniently enough
Tarzan's cousin and thusly technically the
wrong heir to the title), and associates. One such man, a Frenchman,
teaches Tarzan to speak, and long story short after a series of mishaps,
stabbings, he and Jane fooling about when they can but her being too
stupid to realize he's the one leaving her love
letters, Tarzan goes to America. He frightens off Jane's fiance, another
cousin, but the novel ends with her insisting she made the man a
promise (he bailed her father out of a financial hole and she was
promised as a sweetener) and saying she would only marry
him, not her Ape Man.
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