Summer stretches long and golden before Tom Sawyer, and every moment feels like a crime not committed. In the sweltering Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Tom escapes his Aunt Polly's watchful eye to trade chores for swimming holes, whitewashed fences for buried treasure, and respectable behavior for the dangerous company of Huck Finn. He negotiates his way out of work with the clever persuasion of a born diplomat, fights a new boy in town named Joe Harper over the honor of being admired, and falls desperately in love with the new girl in town, Becky Thatcher, only to suffer the particular agonies of childhood rejection. Tom's world pulses with the urgent desire to be free: free from school, free from church, free from the endless moralizing of adults who have forgotten what it felt like to be young. Yet beneath the mischief lies something more tender, as Tom begins to discover that courage, loyalty, and even guilt are things a boy can feel very deeply. Twain captures the entire universe of childhood in a single summer afternoon, rendering it with a humor so sharp it cuts straight to the truth.
