The White Mountains (Tripods) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of..." (more)
Key Phrases: The White Mountains, The Tripod, Captain Curtis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Long Ago, The Tripods -- huge, three-legged machines -- descended upon Earth and took control. People no longer understand automation nor machines, and unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power.

But for a time in each person's life -- in childhood -- he is not a slave. Will still has time to escape.

About the Author

John Christopher (Sam Youd) was born in England in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm. His early years were spent in Lancashire and Hampshire. He left school at sixteen to work as a local government clerk until being called up for army service in 1941, and spent the following four and a half years with the Royal Corps of Signals, in Gibraltar, North Africa, Italy, and Austria.

On leaving the army he renewed a teenage ambition toward being a writer, and in 1947, on the basis of an unfinished novel, won an Atlantic Award, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to devote himself to writing for a year. He tried to justify the award by writing serious novels, but subsequently also wrote detective thrillers, light comedies, novels based on cricket, and science fiction, to which he had been passionately devoted in his early teens. After several adult science fiction novels, he was asked to write for the young adult field, and ended up writing sixteen books in that genre, including The Guardians, The Lotus Caves, Dom and Va, Empty World, and the Sword and Fireball trilogies, as well as the Tripods trilogy. Following a BBC television series in 1984 based on the Tripods books, he wrote a prequel, When the Tripods Came, explaining how it all came about.

Sam Youd is a widower with five children and numerous grandchildren, and lives in Rye, in the county of Sussex, England. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9-12
  
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Simon Pulse; 2nd edition (October 30, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0020427115
• ISBN-13: 978-0020427117
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (113 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #471,635 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This is item 1 in The Tripods Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More frightening than you think, May 1, 2003

By	Peter Vinton Jr. (Not near Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A masterpiece --I thoroughly enjoyed this book when I was nine and now my eight year-old son is beginning to explore it. Masterful use of setting, dialogue, and rich visual descriptions that at first suggest a quiet English village of the seventeenth, perhaps the early eighteenth century. Then along come the clues: ruined metal buildings, mysterious half-corroded signs, whispered gossip of the craftsmanship of "Men in the Days Before The Tripods." Then the hero's cousin (and best friend) is happily "capped" in a rite of adulthood by a weird and mysterious leviathan straight out of an H.G. Wells novel, and the broader scope pulls into focus.

Christopher's trilogy is exciting, suspenseful, and throws around a lot of mysteries that any preteen reader should be able to reason out without too much difficulty. There is some innocent romance, but no sex. The violence is mostly implied, though there is a disturbing "field surgery" scene towards the end, as well as a nail-biting hunt and a decisive final battle. The heros' actual arrival in the Swiss Alps is somewhat anticlimactic --it sheds no new light on Earth's predicament, but merely brings Will, Henry, and "Beanpole's" quest to an end.

Best moments include the boys' sojourn through "The City of the Ancients," the devastated ruins of what was once Paris. The descriptions from Will's insular point-of-view are a delight to puzzle out, particularly when the boys encounter ordinary everyday twentieth-century objects and try to figure out what they are (i.e., "Shmand-Fair"). The discovery of a cache of explosive "iron eggs" in a subway tunnel paints a broader scope of the initial invasion: it appears there was at least some active resistance before the aliens worked out a way to assume control of human minds.

Buy this for your 8-9-10-11 year-old boy and have some fun reading it to one another. And don't neglect either of the sequels: they bring the story full circle!

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a very good book!, October 13, 1999

By A Customer

I had to find a book at our school library for a readingassignment. I hate doing this, because I never find anythinggood. While I was looking for a book, I pulled out "The White Mountains". I looked at the cover and thought it was a cheap rip-off of "War of the Worlds"... But you can't tell a book by its cover! Time ran out, so I picked up that book, and we checked out our books and started to read. I was hooked! I got in trouble several times for reading in class. I kept reading and reading, and when I finally finished, I almost cried! But the next day I went to school I found out it was the first book of a series. I got the next one, "The City of Gold and Lead" and I'm still hooked! Now I've started the 3rd book, "The Pool of Fire." I love it too. I'm not totally sure why I like it... It's just... GOOD! Buy the series! You will love it! I'd give it 6 stars, and I recommend it to all ages.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best SF Stories Ever, November 30, 2005

By	A. O. Sheepfielder (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Mountains (Mass Market Paperback)

This is one of those times when five stars just ain't enough.

"The White Mountains" is a fantastic science fiction adventure with deeply poigniant, sociological meaning. It's a fast-paced, thrilling, and thought-provoking story of young people fleeing enslavement, set in a world in which humanity has been conquered by giant machines called the "Tripods" and forced back into a technologically-regressed, feudal state through "Capping," the process by which mind-control devices are implanted directly onto the human skull.

So cool.

Although its target audience is adolescents, particularly boys (I first read it around age 11), "The White Mountains" is one of those books like "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," "A Wrinkle in Time," and "Harry Potter" that is so remarkably well-written that it captivates children and adults alike.

But, like they say on "Reading Rainbow," you don't have to take MY word for it. Next time you're at the bookstore, pull "The White Mountains" off the shelf (it's usually in the "Young Adult" section) and flip ahead to Chapter 5, "The City of the Ancients." By itself, that chapter is one of the best science fiction short stories ever written. If you can leave the store without "The White Mountains" after that, get a mirror and check your scalp -- you've probably been Capped.