Customer Reviews

Classic Starts: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Classic Starts Series)

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jules Verne must have rolled in his grave when this butcher-job of a book was published. When I was a kid, I loved Jules Verne novels and read them in their entirety and unabridged, so I was very excited about reading this abridged version to my five year old, who loves sea creatures, ships, and adventures. Man, was I disappointed! This is not an abridgement so much as a molestation of the text. The sentences are so choppy and the pacing is so utterly destroyed, that you will feel more like you are reading a grocery list. And, as if that wasn't enough, the butchers who had the gall to publish this book so watered down (no pun intended!) the content and themes as to make the story almost totally unrecognizable. The encounter with the giant squid? Hacked down to one poorly written paragraph, mentioned almost in passing. The battles with the warships? Gone. The maelstrom at the end? A "storm" in which Arronax, Conseil, and Ned almost casually walked out of the ship and rowed away on a boat!

Remembering even a little of this atrocity now makes me cringe, and I only finished it out of a kind of morbid curiosity. That, and the fact that it really will put you to sleep at night!

And, please, don't get me wrong - I'm all for abridging texts for younger readers. I was introduced to Moby Dick and many other classics in this way and the good ones made me thirst to read the "real" versions when I was older. This version, however, is so horrible that it may put your kid off of the English language all together. So, next time you want to read 20,000 leagues, do yourself a favor and let the "Classic Start" RIP and read the original. And if you don't think your kid can handle the battles and the political commentary and the themes of loss and and revenge, then just go to the grocery store and browse the seafood isle. It'll be more entertaining.

My son will be 4 in a week and we recently finished this book. I have quite a few classic starts, but so far this is the only one we have finished. Gulliver's Travels was a bit boring and Arabian Nights opens with a story about a man who wants to marry a woman just to kill her...with this book, I could read it and not worry about the appropriateness of the material. There was only a couple scenes that I felt a mild cringe over but if you read ahead, you could easily skip over them and not cause a problem for story continuity. One of those is the part about a man who is diving for pearls and nearly gets eaten by a shark, but Capt Nemo attacks the shark with a knife (it's a bit of a bloody scene and for my kid who love all things ocean...shark killing doesn't go over well with him). The second is when they see whales and see some terrible creature following them and basically slaughter them (the creatures...not the whales)...also a bit bloody. Anyway, the rest was great. Lots of adventure and surprisingly very environmentally sensitive in most parts and also lots of moral overtones (giving wealth to the poor, etc)

Son has to read this book for summer reading assignment; product arrived in timely fashion and in good condition and @ good price.

When I was a child this was one of my favorite books. I read the original when I was 11. My child is only 6 but he is in the gifted class and he reads at 4th grade level. I though that being an adaptation he would be able to enjoy it. He did. Now he is famiiar with the story and is more likely to read the original when he is older. It is a good way to expose young kids to classic stories that other wise they will no choose over other choices of modern literature.