Customer Reviews

In Search of the Castaways

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Although I was looking forward to reading "The Castaways", otherwise known as "The Children of Captain Grant", the beauty of the writing was disturbed by glaring errors. Hyphens and random symbols randomly intrude upon the narrative and dialogue alike. Sentences are cut in half and divided by several lines of blank space. To be honest, the book is published by a .com publishing company that failed to review and edit what could have been a wonderful rendition of an engaging story. It looks as though they downloaded the translation of the story without adjusting for changes in format or checking for errors. Shame on them. Although this particular novel is difficult to find in an English edition, do not waste your money. Let us put an end to cheap publishers demeaning good works. Do not purchase this version--search for another.

The book is wonderful. It's a great adventure story, favorite with every child and adult I know. BUT - this edition looks like it is an unedited scan. Thousands of hyphens appear in totally incorrect places. First, I was determined to disregard them and enjoy the book, but by the end of 50th page I was really annoyed. This is not a book, merely a draft that needs editing. It is a shame that there is no normal edition in print.

The book (story) is excellent and I highly recommend it!
It's a great adventure and one of the best from Jules Verne.
I've read it many times as a kid, and it certainly deserves
5 stars, but the quality of the softcover indypublish.com
version is abysmal: crooked pages, bad layout with hyphenated
words in the middle of lines all over... certainly does not
worth $...

We were appalled by many of the editions of this book currently on Amazon because of the poor editing, layout, and design. Our company reedited this Jules Verne classic, with a new cover, and page design, and added 90 vintage illustrations from the original 1873 edition. When the book was published and placed on Amazon in 2009, Amazon automatically attached to it several older reviews from other publishers' editions. These reviews do not accurately describe this new edition. Look at the dates the reviews were written, if they are dated before 2009 they are not describing this edition of the book.

I read it in Russian (under a different title-Captain Grant's children)when I was a child and it is probably one of the best adventure books ever!!!!!!!!!!! The russian movie based on the book was good too....I tried to find an English version for my husband, who had no idea about this book...I am glad there is one now...Highly recommend to youth and adults who are loking for a wonderful adventure...

This nicely bound book boasts inferior translation although it was done by an English PhD, and the type is puncuated with hypens in the middle of a sentence. This is very annoying but after about 100 pages, with patience the reader can over look this flaw if patient The greatest disappointment is the poor English translation that is at times, hard to follow as it appears the translation is literal and very clumsy to read in English. This is a book on demand edition (it is downloaded from a computer and bound when ordered and the presentation is more than acceptable), butd surely there is a better edition of this exciting adventure yarn in existence that has a broad appeal to young and old alike. It's a shame that the high price on this edition is so poorly done considering it was written by one of the most creative writers in literature. Verne has a tendency to spend far to much time detailing geography and sacrificing characterization for plot. The dialog at times is also very juvenile...but this could be due to the this particular edition, as this is the first time I have found a copy of this particular book. If nothing is available, then buy this edition. It's a rousing good yarn.

I read this book in Spanish when I was a child. It is one of my favorite books by Verne. It is as captivating as 20,000 leagues under the sea, journey to the center of the earth, and other books by Verne. I was surprised to see that there was no English version when I looked for one two years ago! I highly recommend it to people from all ages. Briefly, it is the story of two children who travel all around the world looking for his missing father. Throughout their journey they are many times on the brink of losing their lives, from being hunted by a giant condor, to sharing with a jaguar a sole tree set afire by an electric bolt in the Argentinian pampas. This book will become very popular among English speakers very soon.

In Search of the Castaways is actually the first book in a triology by Verne, the 2nd being the famous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the 3rd being The Mysterious Island, and, I think that the trilogy shows him improving and evolving as a writer. This means that the last one is the best (and one of my favourites of Verne's) and that this one is the worst.

Of course, like so many of Verne's works, it's still an entertaining adventure. It tells of a story of the search for Captain Grant by his young children, a captain, an eccentric scientist and many others, all aboard the one ship and armed with the classic message in a bottle (with only the latitude of the location, the longitude being erased). So, they try circumnavigate the globe and encounter a great deal of environs, people and nature. This is Verne at his descriptive best but in this book, the descriptions become overbearing as he goes on for pages and pages (even more than usual). Also, as an Australian [although I know this was before the 20th century but still...] his descriptions of the continent are a bit cliched and probably rely on his contemporary audience never having been more than 2000km away from Paris.

Yes, there's the usual betrayal, triumph and tragedy which makes it a good children's book. But it has no finer detail that some of his more mature works have. If you want something that will make you think (beyond the escapism and armchair travel aspects of Verne's books - which is certainly a legitimate and worthwhile reason for those books), try the Mysterious Island.

Finally, I did not read the book in this edition so I don't know anything about this specific one.

While not one of Verne's most famous works, this is a great read and ties two of those greats (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island) neatly together.

I read this book when I was very young, and have read it many more times. It's one of the best works of Jules Verne. The twists and turns in the book kept me in the book until the very last word. As usual, Jules Verne expresses his words in the best possible way and the plot is wonderful.