The Forest Exiles: The Perils of a Peruvian Family in the Wilds of the Amazon

Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
496K words
Chapters
50

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Amazon ExpeditionJungle AdventureFamily TiesFate and FortuneFamily SurvivalGrowing UpExotic CultureYouth Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Forest Exiles: The Perils of a Peruvian Family in the Wilds of the AmazonAuthor: Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Mar 12, 2008

Editor's review

The Forest Exiles is Mayne Reid's adventure novel set in the Amazon jungle, telling of a Peruvian family's struggle to survive in the wilderness. Its readability comes from Reid's characteristic storytelling: dense environmental description, unrelenting crises, and characters who show ingenuity and resilience amid scarce resources and natural threats. As public-domain English literature, it is both a light adventure read and a sample of how nineteenth-century English adventure fiction imagined South American nature. Two threads are worth watching: the family's survival strategies and division of labor in an unfamiliar environment, and the narrator's depiction of the jungle, rivers, and indigenous peoples—the latter carrying an unmistakable period perspective that merits a critical eye. The electronic edition is easy to obtain and suits分段 reading on commutes or before sleep, but one should not expect modern ecological writing or deep cultural description.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to grasp the characters and their situation, then proceed crisis by crisis.
  2. Keep a map or geography notes to mark rivers and routes, enhancing the sense of space.
  3. Annotate passages describing nature and indigenous peoples, distinguishing literary imagination from factual information.
  4. After finishing, compare a modern work of nature writing to discuss shifts in the perspective of adventure narrative.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  11. 11
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  13. 13
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  15. 15
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  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
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  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50

FAQ

Is this book suitable for children? It was written as an adventure novel for a general audience, with tense plots but nineteenth-century language and depictions of indigenous peoples that carry period prejudice. Adolescents should read with adult guidance and discussion; young children are not well suited to reading it independently.
Are the Amazon descriptions in the story reliable? The natural and cultural descriptions serve the adventure narrative and carry the author's period imagination and stereotypes; they should not be taken as geographical or ethnographic sources. It can be read as a literary text, but for understanding Amazonian ecology and peoples, modern scientific works should be consulted.
What English level is required? It is a nineteenth-century English novel with long sentences and archaic expressions and natural terms. Intermediate readers can manage with a dictionary, while beginners are advised to start with a simplified edition or Chinese summary before returning to the original.

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About the author

Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883 Author

Mayne Reid (1818–1883) was a prolific nineteenth-century writer of English-language adventure fiction. Details of his life are limited in publicly available sources; what is relatively reliable is that he was born in 1818 and died in 1883. The library holds 57 of his works, commonly classified as inspirational coming-of-age stories, which shows that his writing centered on adventure and growth for young readers. Representative works include The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas, set on the Texas frontier, along with Ran Away to Sea, The Forest Exiles, The Desert Home, The Maroon, The Quadroon, and The Land of Fire, which carry readers to the Amazon jungle, the wilderness, the sea, and the Far West. His novels feature tight plots and wide-open settings, often depicting separated families, survival in foreign lands, and youthful adventure; they were widely read in the English-speaking world and have had some influence on later adventure literature.