The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie quiet of the deserted public square has had something of the earliest fairy tale about it, as if we were all slumbering in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. At the same time, the apocalyptic media landscape of death graphs will have been familiar to fans of the latest young adult dystopias. Either way, for the healthy at home the action is still happening elsewhere, so this might be a good time for confident younger readers to tackle those enduring classics which have seen more than one generation through a crisis.
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson will resonate with any child feeling isolated, but this compulsive thriller offers much more than the one-word Netflix-style title suggests. The real-life-inspired abduction of young David Balfour might be plotted with as many bingeable twists and reveals as a box set, but David’s evolving relationship with his rescuer Alan recalls that of Jim Hawkins with Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
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