WOW. Now this is what I call a ripping yarn! (Maybe I should make that a Goodreads tag for my shelf?) Novels like this are why I'm passionate about fiction and why I can never imagine growing bored with reading, as there remain an endless number of works like this waiting to be discovered. From the moment I cracked open the first page, I felt as if I were a boy again just encountering literature for the first time.

I enjoyed reading Stevenson as a teenager (although not this much!) and just returned to his work last year with [b:The Black Arrow|296264|The Black Arrow|Robert Louis Stevenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328014614s/296264.jpg|3080386], which was a disappointing, disjointed collection of genres mashed together in a loose narrative. But The Master of Ballantrae was just the opposite: a focused, tightly crafted, dark adventure story that had me racing to the conclusion.

The narrative unfolded in the form of a found manuscript (containing letters, memoirs, and first-hand accounts from other sources) written by the servant of the house of Durrisdeer, whose two aristocratic brothers were in conflict against each other for their entire lives. James was a rascal (adventurous, greedy, violent, and disarmingly charming in his devious ways), while Henry was good to a fault (calm, generous, stable, and at times sickly). They represented the duality of any aristocratic family, sort of like a familial version of Jekyll and Hyde. Their life-long struggle involved adventure, war, pirates, duels, death, madness... great stuff! This novel was just a fun ride.

It is easily my favorite Stevenson work so far and makes me want to put aside all my other current books and skip over my massive pile of "to-read" materials just to keeping reading Stevenson.