regshoe

Yes, it does seem to have been published as a boys' book, though I'm not sure exactly how demographic marketing worked back then.

Are they celebrating the lack of women? The general attitude seems more 'this is notably weird, but it doesn't matter, the book is really good anyway' to me. Though I completely agree on the conflation of 'women' and 'romance', aargh.

and also by their insistence that the only kind of love is heterosexual love -- how does this story even work if Alan and Davy don't love each other?

'It has hidden within it, not so hard to find I suppose, a love story as well.' —Isobel McArthur, champion in being right about Kidnapped. Clearly they weren't looking very hard!

Though I think this may be partly the vocabulary thing—'love story' in 1880s dialect does seem to mean '(presumed-het) romantic love story' pretty strictly. (Whereas 'romance' means 'larger-than-life dramatic story' with no connotation of what we now call romantic love—several of the reviews call Kidnapped a romance. To my great amusement, this historical shift in meaning has resulted in the Wikipedia page for the book describing its genre as 'historical romance', while linking to the article on the genre which modern language calls 'historical romance'. I hope no one ever edits that out.) Anyway, it does feel like in general the reviewers don't really appreciate the central importance of Alan and Davie's relationship, although some of them do say some nice things about it.