Review: Yes, No, Yes, No, Maybe
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 30, 2010
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002Y26XYE/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_imgIs this collection worth reading and worth buying for your children? Yes.Is it appropriate for home school as a textbook? No.Is it appropriate as supplemental reading? Yes.Are the Tom Swift, Jr., books that follow the main collection worth reading? No. No. Nonononono. I couldn't get through a single one of the books without dozing off. There is too much science--a very early use of computers, but Tom still uses a slide rule--too much bad science, and too little personality. The characters are totally wooden, and in the original series, although the characters tend to be repetitive, they are fairly realistic as characters.Would today's teenager, totally used to all the miracle inventions, be impressed by these books? Would he or she enjoy them? Maybe, but only if the teenager can accept last century's stereotypes without becoming offended.My husband is just enough younger than I am that he remembers enjoying the Tom Swift Jr. books. I never saw them. What I read was my father's original Tom Swift books, scrounged from my grandparents' attic. I remember having to explain word usage to my brother, when he was complaining that they blamed everything on the confederates, and had to be told the difference between Confederates and confederates.Not only did I thoroughly enjoy reading these books, which included a number of Tom Swift's I'd never seen before, but in fact--with 52 more years behind me and a Ph.D. in English--I found them much better than I had thought they were when I was in high school.There were at least two writers in the first series, with a third who showed up near the end. One of the writers never did any research, and invented entire cities in major countries out of his head. He had a fight between a lion and a tiger in India and had a fight between two tigers in Africa--in the SAME BOOK. The second did very heavy research and the difference shows; although at times he becomes rather pedantic, in general the research is well used.I can't possibly give this more than a 3 rating, largely because of those horrible Tom Swift Jr. books but partly because some of the plots were reused in a very short series, and one got very tired of childhood feuds being carried on into adulthood. Also, continuing to call Tom a "boy" when the chronology of the series makes it clear that he must by now be in his early twenties and being idiotically coy about Tom's courtship make for painful reading even for a teenager.