Something I did not realise going in was that this book is set in Scotland in the years after the Jacobite rebellion but was written 130 years after the fact as a kind of historical true-crime self-insert fanfiction. 

I feel like I would have enjoyed this book more if I could understand more of what was going on. There are constant little allusions to people and events which were mentioned in the way Easter eggs in a marvel film would be presented today. Unfortunately I know very little about this period of history so being gleefully presented with such-and-such Jacobite chieftain living in a remote tree house and other such tangents is of no significance to me.

There is also the matter of Alan Breck Stewart being written as being utterly insufferable. Every time this man opened his mouth I wanted to strangle him and yet David (our main character) idolises him! Even when David tires of Alan it is framed as the fault lying with David. Now to be fair I also didn't like David as he was a bit of a wet blanket and spent the majority of the story fainting at inconvenient moments but at least he wasn't gambling with other people's money that he'd convinced them to hand over while very ill?? 

I stumbled across this book at a library book sale and decided to pick it up and give it a read. I had not previously heard of this book, but I have read one other title from this author ("The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") and really enjoyed it. 
This book follows a young man, David Balfour, whose uncle sets him up to be kidnapped and taken to America so that the uncle can steal the boy's inheritance. David finds himself in an unlikely friendship with an alleged assassin, Alan Breck Stewart. Can David and Alan escape their circumstances and take back what is rightfully David's?
I do not negate the probable merit of this story. I think it is an action-packed and interesting tale that will appeal to younger kids who are just learning about classic literature. The book is more like a novella, and Robert Louis Stevenson writes in a simple way that is still approachable in today's world. For me, however, this book did not keep my attention. 
This book has an audience, it is just not me. 

There may be advantages to my reading this book at the age of 50 without remembering it, having first encountered it as a teen. My attention was attracted by other qualities than its adventure narrative (which it has in sufficiency). It is presented as being written by David Balfour when he is at least as old as I am, and he is analytic about his 17-year-old self as he records the occasions when he was foolish or conceited, as well as the occasions when he did something he still thinks is genuinely fine. This is one of the things that I find most attractive about it this book, the "unheroic" nature of its main character and the two levels of experience presented simultaneously, raw experience and hindsight. I sure don't have much common cultural ground with Scottish Calvinists, but their emphasis on honest self-examination doesn't go amiss, especially blended with the humane attitude toward other people that David Balfour possesses. After all, this is also a portrait of a young man discovering the world beyond his narrow upbringing; the people are as much of a shock to him as the hardships and dangers he is subjected to. Thirdly, it's a depiction of a dark period in Scottish history, the destruction of the Highland clans and their way of life. No wonder Balfour's feelings are ambiguous--he knows that he can't get a proper feeling for Highland culture under the circumstances, but what he does pick up makes him aware of just how different people can be even within one "country," and that perhaps the good is not only on one side. It's a clever choice by Stevenson, who was obviously well read in history, to never use a voice of objective authority, but constantly have Balfour say just, this is what I saw, colored as it was by my strong emotions and my naivete.

It's just too bad that Stevenson couldn't satisfactorily conclude this novel, after breaking it off abruptly. The ending he finally produced, seven years later, in the form of Catriona, does pick up on some of the interesting political and personal themes, but in an overly diffuse manner, and diluted by considerable tedious irrelevancies too. If I was a writer, I would just boil down Catriona into an 8-page epilogue!

By the way, the edition I chose was the audiobook narrated by Kieron Elliott, who does a very creditable job: expressive but almost never exaggerated. Why on earth is he one of only two I could find, out of so many alternative audiobooks, who reads this novel with a Scottish accent? After all, Balfour says at one point that although he is trying to write in English rather than Scots, he fears he will make errors in grammar because of his unfamiliarity with the idiom; sure enough, in the very next paragraph he uses a Scots turn of grammar...