All Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck. Three boys, fifteen-year-old Ralph Rover (...