There must be a point of time in life when we feel the urge to look back to our childhood. Not everyone of us has a happy childhood, but this point of time would come sooner or later. I found reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer accelerate its coming very greatly.

The story was meant to be "a history of a boy," the boy being Tom Sawyer. No harm would be done were the book read by children, but the book will no doubt yield its optimum charm if it is read by a teenager or a grown-up, someone who has passed his childhood and longs to experience it once more.

The storyline itself is very simple. It follows Tom day to day - even minute to minute when time seemed to stop whenever the boy was at church or at school. The beauty of the book lies on the way things being explained as closely as possible to the way children think. Things will get exaggerated most of the time, nevertheless with some honesty. Don't people tend to 'show-off' in front of a big audience, and don't they 'show-off' even more in front of an important person?

But everyone grows up. So did Tom. As the story goes, we can see how Tom gradually thought more and more like a "grown-up," although he couldn't leave behind his boyish way easily.

Strength:
The way things are viewed from the eyes of children.
How Tom found out that once he promised not to swear, he wanted to swear very badly. And how his desire to swear miraculously fanish when he was no longer forbidden to do so.
How Tom ran away from home, playing pirate with his friends, quite ignorant that he had made his aunt very worried.
Weakness:
The same weakness most other adventure stories have: among all the boys in the village, all the excitements and adventures only happened to Tom, Tom, and Tom! It's amazing to see every extraordinary things always happened to Tom, or Tom and his companion, but never anyone else without Tom.
Other than that, readers who are not familiar with American dialect might find dialogues hard to understand.

Additional comment:
Twain seems to remind us that "grown-ups" sometimes accept insensible things just to be accepted or to get status in society. Further, they even expect - if not force - their children to do insensible things to get a special status not for the children, but for themselves.
In the village Sunday school, a Bible would be rewarded to a child who were able to memorize two thousand verses. Anyone dared to say that this was ridiculous?

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