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A review by dotorsojak
Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the Road by Victor Appleton
2.0
My father used to talk about the Tom Swift novels and I have long meant to try one. They are of course not written by anyone named Victor Appleton. Appleton was a nom de plume for a consortium of writers. The books seem to be rather like Hardy Boy mysteries of a later generation.
I read the first one, this one named above, and I must say it is not very good, even for a YA book meant for boys of the last century. I did read some Hardy Boys in my childhood, but have not read one in many, many years. Still this Tom Swift does not seem even as good as my memory of the Hardy Boys. As one of the earlier reviewers said, this is not a classic.
Spoilers follow.
Tom starts off on a bicycle but soon graduates to a motorcycle, which he is perpetually tinkering with and improving. He lives with his widowed father and a nice woman like Aunt Bee, who keeps the house running and prepares the meals. He runs into some men who are interested in his father’s inventions, particularly in a new turbine engine, which it turns out they want to steal. They are comically inept. Their ineptness is only surpassed by Tom and dad’s cluelessness. Tom eventually tracks the men—who have succeeded in stealing a working model of the machine AND the only copy of the plans for it—to an abandoned house on the edge of lake. Even when the men realize that they are being watched by someone, they don’t take flight. They stay agreeably in place so that Tom can go find some adults to surround the house, capture the men, and and recover the invention. Nevertheless, the criminals DO get away. But Tom is okay with that since he gets back the model and the plans. His father is real happy and says he doesn’t want to press charges.
One of the most painful parts of the book deals with Tom’s encounter with a black working class character who speaks in dialect. His name is Eradicate Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln Sampson and he has a donkey name Boomerang. Eradicate’s (Rad for short) various adventures trying to get work for himself and Boomerang are supposed to be hilarious but are not. Eradicate has no part in the main mystery or adventure—he doesn’t help Tom do anything and he provides no insight. He is present solely as a source of unfunny comedy. Still he is slightly interesting as an illustration of racial attitudes in 1910. The book is set in 1910 in upstate New York, but it could as easily have been set in the south.
I do not recommend this book for anyone. I give it two stars because it has some anthropological and historical interest…
I read the first one, this one named above, and I must say it is not very good, even for a YA book meant for boys of the last century. I did read some Hardy Boys in my childhood, but have not read one in many, many years. Still this Tom Swift does not seem even as good as my memory of the Hardy Boys. As one of the earlier reviewers said, this is not a classic.
Spoilers follow.
Tom starts off on a bicycle but soon graduates to a motorcycle, which he is perpetually tinkering with and improving. He lives with his widowed father and a nice woman like Aunt Bee, who keeps the house running and prepares the meals. He runs into some men who are interested in his father’s inventions, particularly in a new turbine engine, which it turns out they want to steal. They are comically inept. Their ineptness is only surpassed by Tom and dad’s cluelessness. Tom eventually tracks the men—who have succeeded in stealing a working model of the machine AND the only copy of the plans for it—to an abandoned house on the edge of lake. Even when the men realize that they are being watched by someone, they don’t take flight. They stay agreeably in place so that Tom can go find some adults to surround the house, capture the men, and and recover the invention. Nevertheless, the criminals DO get away. But Tom is okay with that since he gets back the model and the plans. His father is real happy and says he doesn’t want to press charges.
One of the most painful parts of the book deals with Tom’s encounter with a black working class character who speaks in dialect. His name is Eradicate Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln Sampson and he has a donkey name Boomerang. Eradicate’s (Rad for short) various adventures trying to get work for himself and Boomerang are supposed to be hilarious but are not. Eradicate has no part in the main mystery or adventure—he doesn’t help Tom do anything and he provides no insight. He is present solely as a source of unfunny comedy. Still he is slightly interesting as an illustration of racial attitudes in 1910. The book is set in 1910 in upstate New York, but it could as easily have been set in the south.
I do not recommend this book for anyone. I give it two stars because it has some anthropological and historical interest…