Customer Reviews

Into the Abyss (Tom Swift, Young Inventor)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great re-launch for the Tom Swift series! An action-packed story, told in the first person (like the new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series) make this an entertaining read for all ages. The cover art/packaging is also very cool, appealing to new readers to this series and collectors of old. I can't wait for more, and hopefully a new Dana Girls series is not far behind!

One of my 4th graders, though he's a capable reader, has spent most of the year complaining that he hates reading and doesn't like any of the books in the classroom library. I ordered this book from the Tom Swift series to see if it would catch his interest. It worked. I'll be ordering more of the Tom Swift books--about a young inventor and his adventures--to keep my student reading.

I grew up reading books like the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, The Three Investigators and the Danny Dunn series. I loved these stories and now my children read these old stories. In particular, Tom Swift was always one of my favorite series. I grew up reading the earlier versions from a few decades ago and I collect the earlier versions of the series. It was my love for these stories that shaped my own children's book.John Fastramp and the Dakota 3000 Challenge

As an adolescent, I was an avid reader of the books about Tom Swift Jr. written in the sixties. Tom was an idol, for years my fantasy was to be an inventor, acquire a tropical island and create things that would solve the problems of humanity. I have also read several of the original Tom Swift adventures written in the early twentieth century and this is the second of the latest series that I have read.
Bud Barclay is no longer the fitting companion to Tom in tempting the fates of danger; he is the editor of the school newspaper and a scientific illiterate, although he is very knowledgeable about everything else. Yolanda is the second of Tom's sidekicks in this series; she is a computer genius, taking up the technical slack left by Bud.
The main invention of this book is a skin-tight diving suit that allows the wearer to descend to enormous depths of the ocean. A secondary invention is a device that will send signals to sharks that will confuse them, keeping them from pressing attacks. When Tom's father descends into an oceanic trench in order to place devices that will warn of an earthquake on the ocean floor and the subsequent tsunami, a sudden earthquake takes place. Shifting rock pins the sub to the floor and Tom descends in an attempt to free it.
Being resourceful, Tom is able to free the sub in the nick of time, although it means that he has to walk on the ocean floor in his new suit. As is typical of this type of adventures, there is a battle with a giant squid and several other obstacles to overcome. Tom and the crew of the stranded sub are pulled from the ocean floor with only minutes to spare.
As a veteran reader of Tom Swift stories, I tend to approach the new series with a critical slant. It is sometimes difficult to be objective when you have such a fondness for the earlier model. Nevertheless, I found this story to be very good and believe that it will generate as much excitement in the modern generation of readers about science as the earlier series did in me.

The writing is for kids, but the new series is a nice update. My 9yo son love the new over the old. I still like the writing in the older series.
Would recommend. Not expensive, OK soft cover.

This is a great book! Tom Swift is smart, wise-cracking, and serious at the same time. This novel is very suspenseful. It is very good for the technologically minded. I would recommend this for fourth grade and up. There are five sequels to this book. I recommend them all.

My 9 year old son says.......This is a great book -- fun and awesome. It has adventure and sea-sickness. You should definitely read it.

I grew up on Tom Swift Jr adventures, so I thought I'd take a look at how my friends were doing 30 years later.

Tom Swift is now more like a kid, rather than the god-like person he was in the previous series. His dad is now more of an authority figure, rather than taking direction from Tom. Mom isn't just a housewife, but a sculptor, and sister Sandy is a research scientist. Bud isn't a test pilot any more, but supposedly a genius in every non-scientific subject.

While I appreciate the effort to make the other characters more Tom's equal, the author failed to do more than make a laundry list of their skill sets, all of them implausibly impressive. When looking at their behavior, they were all as shallow as they were in the old series, only serving to "ooh" and "ah" over Tom's exploits. Bud, for instance, the supposed genius, still served the plot by displaying ignorance about every subject in order to allow Tom to explain to the reader.

No matter, this was still an exciting story because Tom is more human, with human limitations, so the danger appears more real than in the older series.

I purchased this series ( #1-5) for my son when he was 8 yo. I began reading them to him, as they were quite technical. It didn't take him long before he was devouring them on his own. He quickly moved through all 5 books of the series. Now 9 yo. he has read them a second time and is asking when the next one (#6) comes out. I am ordering #6 for Christmas. Shhhh!