The Coral Island 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".
Despair (novel) novels, with it trailing only "Lolita" (1955). However, Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd seemed to have ambivalent feelings toward "Despair", noting that although "Nabokov's sheer intelligence crackles in every line... the book's style... seems sadly lacking in its structure... It never quite convinces, and page after page that would make one tingle with excitement in another context can here only intermittently overcome one's remoteness from a story whose central premise fails to merit the suspension of disbelief". "Despair" is the second Nabokov novel to feature unreliable narration from a first-person point of view, the first being "The Eye" with the character