Customer Reviews

The Lost World Adventures

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Written and illustrated by Mark Stephen Smith this fiction book for young readers closely and quite nicely mimics The Lost World story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But Smith makes it uniquely different in so many ways and does an admirable job of mixing Christian spirituality into its fabrication. Easily he weaves in faith and presents the creation story with some genuine reasoning based upon it in relation to dinosaurs.

Taking place in the early 1900's, a small group of adventurers set out to locate and explore the fable of a lost world hidden atop a high plateau in the midst of an unknown Amazon region of South America. Their objective is to bring back for the Royal Zoological Society in London, personal accounts and evidence of primitive/prehistoric life encountered there, (natives, ape-men, and dinosaurs). The characters and their personalities are shuffled around a bit, written in third person rather than first person when compared to Doyle's novel. But it remains true in context and I was pleasantly surprised when Smith added Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a main character in the story.

In the beginning of this eight-chapter book, the reader is brought into the depths of the Amazon jungle where Lord George Roxton is on the hunt of a large pesky serpentine, and I thought this first chapter took on the likeness of a Crocodile Hunter scenario. But this alternate beginning engages the interest wonderfully and makes a nice lead into more of Doyle's original storyline. The book exhibits many colorful cartoon-like illustrations throughout its pages and these are imaginative and quite whimsical. Their addition reveals the story beautifully and impressively.

Smith takes the Lost World story of Doyle's and utilizes it in a way to demonstrate certainty in the chronicle of creation and mistaken facts in the evolution idea, but keeps it all very simple and clear. It's great Christian based reading and should appeal to young minds. Because of its curious creativity and its Christian viewpoints, this book is a distinctive stand out. [reviewed at amazon.com by tilley_traveler]

I do not write this as a literature expert, what's more my native language is not even English. But I've read a great many good English books and here's my take on this one.

The idea of a book like this is fresh and original, but, unfortunately, it doesn't read like a good story. Sorry, it falls far short of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work. Advanced vocabulary but choppy story line. It feels like a big story jammed into a small book. Characters are one-sided and undeveloped. The author seems to be taking a shortcut to disprove the evolution theory. I was disappointed.

I'd say "Life in the Great Ice Age" is a much better attempt although not exactly in the same category.