My daughter (one of my daughters, there are two around here) and I were talking about the kinds of books we like to read. If you’re serious about writing you should read anything you get your hands on, but you still find your favorites. She likes historical stories with a little romance but can’t stand contemporary romance.
I love to read adventure books and thrillers. I’ve published a lot of what I’d call fantasy-adventure—the Alex Van Helsing books are basically spy adventures with some magic. But I’ve never actually published a straight, no-magic-involvead adventure until Young Captain Nemo, which comes out in March 2019.
Young Captain Nemo comes from a long tradition of adventure novels that revolve around expeditions: the main character gathers his or her crew and sets out to learn or bring back something. It’s a story as old as the Golden Fleece, which Jason had to go find in his ship Argo. I’m a sucker for anything where you tell me, “okay, they hear there’s this thing across the world and they gotta go get it, but they only have a few days.” If it could include a map and a dotted line, I am so there.
So Gabriel’s first adventure is one of those, but it’s not here yet. If you’re looking for a list of great adventure books, here are 5 Great Adventure Books to keep you busy until then!
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne - This book and the next, as I’ve written before, are the source of the story of Captain Nemo and his great ship Nautilus. 20,000 Leagues is a classic quest adventure: Professor Arronax sets out to discover the mystery of a sea creature only to discover the creature is an experimental submarine, which he joins for a journey that includes unknown caverns, escapes from collapsing ice floes, and the sunken city of Atlantis.
- Mysterious Island by Jules Verne - Forget what you might know from movies involving giant crabs and things, Mysterious Island is a straight adventure about a group of men trying to survive on a desert island. You can learn so much from this book, but the best thing is the team’s relentless optimism in the face of their challenges.
- Congo, Michael Crichton. Another one where you should pretend there never was a movie. Congo was Crichton’s pitch-perfect homage to classic jungle adventures. In this one, a team including an intelligent gorilla go in search of a lost city. Just fantastic.
- The Odyssey, Homer + Translator. At some point everyone who wants to be a writer needs to read the Odyssey, because so much of our references in Western Civilization come from here. In modern terms, the Odyssey is a fast-moving fantasy involving dangerous sirens who try to hypnotize Odysseus and his crew to the giant Cyclops. (By the way, Odysseus uses a fake name at one point, giving Jules Verne the name of his antihero: Nemo.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. People forget how beautiful this book is, the story of a boy making his way down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave he loves like a father. Often tense and sometimes shockingly violent, Huckleberry Finn is one of the great American classics. And man, Twain is great with a voice.
Those are my Top 5 Best Adventure Novels, but I’d stand to be corrected. I’m always looking for more to read, so send them along.
And don't forget to order your copy of Young Captain Nemo. Keep the adventure going, and share it with the kids in life.
"Armed with his wits, his friends, and his Nemotech submarine, a twelve-year-old descendant of Jules Verne’s famous antihero is determined to help make the ocean a safer place one adventure at a time in Jason Henderson's Young Captain Nemo, first in a new middle-grade series."
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