once again meet Tararo, whose daughter Avatea wishes to become a Christian against her father's wishes. The boys attempt to take Avatea in a small boat to a nearby island the chief of which has been converted, but en route they are overtaken by one of Tararo's war canoes and taken prisoner. They are released a month later after the arrival of another missionary, and Tararo's conversion to Christianity. The "false gods" of Mango are consigned to the flames, and the boys set sail for home, older and wiser. They return as adults for another adventure in Ballantyne's 1861 novel The Gorilla Hunters, a sequel to The Coral Island. Genre and style All Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and The Coral Island is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that, in comparison to Robinson Crusoe, such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as The Coral Island and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific. Romance, with its attention to character development, was only restored to the genre of boys' fiction with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island argues literary critic Lisa Honaker. The Coral Island, for all its adventure, is greatly occupied with the realism of domestic fiction (the domain of the realist novel); Ballantyne devotes about a third of the book to descriptions of the boys' living arrangements. The book exhibits a "light-hearted confidence" in its description of an adventure that was above all fun. As Ralph says in his preface: "If there is any boy or man who loves to be melancholy and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly sympathy into the regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book and put it away. It is not meant for him." Professor of English has observed that "the swift movement of the story from coastal England to exotic Pacific island is similar to the swift movement from the real world to the fantastic in children's fantasy". To a modern reader, Ballantyne's books can seem overly concerned with accounts of flora and fauna, an "ethnographic