Illustrated Classics - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea: Abridged Novels With Review Questions

by Jules Verne

The USS Abraham Lincoln sets forth on an expedition in search of a monstrous sea creature creating havoc in the seas, with the brilliant Professor Aronnax, his helper Conseil and the harpoonist Ned on board. But soon, the search party falls into trouble and finds itself aboard the mysterious Nautilus— a technological marvel that piques the curiosity of Aronnax. While Aronnax and Conseil remain enamored by the wonders of the ocean, Ned is bent on escaping his underwater prison. Will the three captives ever manage to escape the Nautilus and its enigmatic maker?

240 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2020

About the author

Novels of French writer Jules Gabriel Verne, considered the founder of modern science fiction, include Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

This author who pioneered the genre. People best know him for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before people invented navigable aircraft and practical submarines and devised any means of spacecraft. He ranks behind Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie as the second most translated author of all time. People made his prominent films. People often refer to Verne alongside Herbert George Wells as the "father of science fiction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_V...

Reviews

[Dee Turner · Rating 2 out of 5]

IMAGE: A GIANT SQUID

I was looking for an abridged version of Jules Verne's original, a classic masterpiece, to review for Pageturnerbooks.org, a non-profit that buys books for students from middle through high school grades in the CA Bay area--a wonderful program, check it out!! (My reviews appear under "news" in the tool bar.)

This version, however, was a real disappointment. At 197 pages, it still managed to drag in ways the original just--doesn't. The sketches were awful, very simple line drawings, often where ornate rooms were described in the text; where Capain Nemo's submarine,* the Nautilus, is supposed to inspire wonder, these drawings rather bulldozed inspiration. And the end happened so fast, so inexplicably, the reader is left with--wha?

The questions at the end for class involvement and assignments are mostly helpful, which is why I gave this an additional star to equal 2, but a few are probably a bit too hard for the reading level of the piece.

I'll keep looking. Children perhaps still too young to read the original classics deserve to be introduced to them in a manner that motivates them to seek the real works when they're older.

*Although a submarine prototype was first designed in 1578 by William Bourne (conceived to be rowed, but under water!), they weren't popularly manufactured until WWI. Verne was ahead of his time, having published this novel in 1872. I hadn't recalled until rereading in this format that many of the sea creatures described are, in fact, real--although today, we know them by other names. For example, he describes bioluminescence, now attributable to about 1,500 sea species. He mentions sea creatures that can bond together to form large masses of 130 feet or more, which today we know as gelatinous siphonophores. He also described a common sea creature we call salps--the bane of every student sea scientist's existence!