"Moonfleet" by J. Meade Falkner

Well, that was... interesting.  The cover makes it look like it might involve tall ships more than it does.  Or pirates, maybe.  There's stuff with ships, but not loads, and there are no pirates, just smugglers.  Sigh.  Also, I watched the 1955 movie version starring Stewart Granger last year, which turns out to be very, very, very loosely based on this.  More like vaguely inspired by the book, really.

The book is about a British orphan in his mid-teens who has a crush on a local girl, accidentally gets involved with smugglers, gets thrown out of his aunt's home and lives at the local pub, ends up in prison in the Netherlands, and then has a kind of miraculous escape just at the end.  With various adventures in between.  I think it's supposed to be kind of like Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, but instead of having a focused plot and a narrative that gambols merrily along, this one felt more like hopping from one stepping stone to the next and hoping you don't lose your balance.  It wasn't bad, and parts of it were really fun, but I just didn't love it.  (I didn't love the movie version either, though I wouldn't mind watching it again sometime just for Stewart Granger.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for violence, smuggling, robbery, danger to a teen and to others, and several perilous and suspenseful sequences.

This is my 11th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, my 20th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023, and my first book read for the Classic Children's Literature Party.