Scan barcode
A review by madarauchiha
To The Center Of The Earth by Greig Beck
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
✨🌠 my about / byf / CW info carrd: uchiha-madara 🌠✨
The author is incredibly sexist. all the female characters are interested in clothes and little else. The one woman character with a speaking part is esentially the romance plot point. As in, if the male character accomplishes a task, he will be rewards with sex from her. That's all her character is good for, frankly.
The book is very generic white male author writing. It reminds me of a horror scifi movie that would play on the Turner Classic Movie channel, complete with rubber suit monsters and stop motion fighting. Very dated and sexist and oriented to a very specific audience which I hope will die out and not be carried into the future. I genuinely cannot believe this was printed in 2020. I was expecting the first printing date to be something like 1950, just based on the rampant sexism and poor plotting.
Cave horror?! No. Nah. The caving parts were very glossed over. If you want tense climbing sequences or any passing mentions of spelunking / caving information, skip this. It's very 'they scaled down the wall'. Not that I'm a caving expert, but I've read other books which had better, more in depth caving scenes. It's not a nitpick, I simply expect a book about caving to have decent caving scenes.
Most of the plot is just going from one place to another with a brief info dump speculation about how different this place is from the above land on earth. Bad things happen. One persondies or is badly injured in which case they will die very soon in the future. Rinse and repeat. This is a brief part of tension in a bunch of monster insect people are hunting the protagonists.
Note for Jewish readers. The plot involves the concept of hollow earth theory. I don't think the antisemitic conspiracy version is involved beyond it having the same origin. Like, obviously you cannot escape the antisemitic, nazi origins of Flat Earth. This takes more inspiration from Jules Verne's idea of a hollow earth. But I admit that I'm not familiar with Verne's concept or if it is somehow separate from the antisemitic version of Flat Earth. Nazism and Jewish people are not mentioned as far as I saw. Frankly, even aside from this, I don't recommend this book. It does mention these things.
▪ Lemuriya.” Michael smiled. “That’s what Katya called this place. It was a mythical lost continent.”
▪ Arkady Saknussov is?”
“Yes, I do,” Michael replied. “He was the 15th century Russian scholar and alchemist who believed the world was hollow.” He smiled sympathetically. “There are many, like me, who believe in that wild theory. That hundreds of millions of years ago the Earth’s molten core began to cool and shrink, and then pulled away from the mantle. It created a space…a space for an entire new world. An untouched paradise.”
Make of this what you will.
Lastly, the dialogue felt like the author grew up solely on marvel movies and joss wheton snappy one liners. Awful.
major ableism, animal death, death, forced institutionalized, gore, spiders, psychiatric abuse, vomit
minor alcohol, cannibalism,
The author is incredibly sexist. all the female characters are interested in clothes and little else. The one woman character with a speaking part is esentially the romance plot point. As in, if the male character accomplishes a task, he will be rewards with sex from her. That's all her character is good for, frankly.
The book is very generic white male author writing. It reminds me of a horror scifi movie that would play on the Turner Classic Movie channel, complete with rubber suit monsters and stop motion fighting. Very dated and sexist and oriented to a very specific audience which I hope will die out and not be carried into the future. I genuinely cannot believe this was printed in 2020. I was expecting the first printing date to be something like 1950, just based on the rampant sexism and poor plotting.
Cave horror?! No. Nah. The caving parts were very glossed over. If you want tense climbing sequences or any passing mentions of spelunking / caving information, skip this. It's very 'they scaled down the wall'. Not that I'm a caving expert, but I've read other books which had better, more in depth caving scenes. It's not a nitpick, I simply expect a book about caving to have decent caving scenes.
Most of the plot is just going from one place to another with a brief info dump speculation about how different this place is from the above land on earth. Bad things happen. One person
Note for Jewish readers. The plot involves the concept of hollow earth theory. I don't think the antisemitic conspiracy version is involved beyond it having the same origin. Like, obviously you cannot escape the antisemitic, nazi origins of Flat Earth. This takes more inspiration from Jules Verne's idea of a hollow earth. But I admit that I'm not familiar with Verne's concept or if it is somehow separate from the antisemitic version of Flat Earth. Nazism and Jewish people are not mentioned as far as I saw. Frankly, even aside from this, I don't recommend this book. It does mention these things.
▪ Lemuriya.” Michael smiled. “That’s what Katya called this place. It was a mythical lost continent.”
▪ Arkady Saknussov is?”
“Yes, I do,” Michael replied. “He was the 15th century Russian scholar and alchemist who believed the world was hollow.” He smiled sympathetically. “There are many, like me, who believe in that wild theory. That hundreds of millions of years ago the Earth’s molten core began to cool and shrink, and then pulled away from the mantle. It created a space…a space for an entire new world. An untouched paradise.”
Make of this what you will.
Lastly, the dialogue felt like the author grew up solely on marvel movies and joss wheton snappy one liners. Awful.
major ableism, animal death, death, forced institutionalized, gore, spiders, psychiatric abuse, vomit
minor alcohol, cannibalism,
Content Warnings
Graphic: Vomit, Ableism, Death, Animal death, Injury/Injury detail, Forced institutionalization, and Gore
Moderate: Cannibalism and Alcohol