Subject: THE SECRET OCEANS by Betty Ballantine

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper)
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 02:58:11 GMT

THE SECRET OCEANS by Betty Ballantine
         Bantam, ISBN 0-553-09660-5, 1994, about 160pp, $29.95
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper

     Given the success of DINOTOPIA, what could be more natural than
trying to do another book with the same format to reach the same
market?  But there are a couple of problems with THE SECRET OCEANS: the
artists they have commissioned are no James Gurneys, and people are
just not as interested in sea dwellers as they are in dinosaurs.

     I say that the artists are no James Gurneys, but another problem
is that there are twelve artist instead of just one.  DINOTOPIA was a
single coherent vision.  THE SECRET OCEANS alternately pictures the
undersea world as luminous, cartoonish, impressionistic, muddled, and
so on.  It's possible that each artist's paintings form a coherent
view, but while there is a list of which pages were done by which
artists, *there are no page numbers*!

     There is also a story, but I couldn't get past the oh-so-cliche
beginning: a research team comprising a female ex-Soviet submarine
commander, a Scottish-Japanese chief engineer, a very ecologically-
minded scientist, a fourteen-year-old boy who's a musical genius and
speaks eight languages, a fifteen-year-old girl who's an electronics
whiz and helped develop the computer of the submarine they will be
exploring in, and a science reporter prepare to leave in a new undersea
exploration vessel named the "Turtle."  I don't know if this is too 50s,
too Hollywood, or both, but it's too something for me.

     Now maybe I'm expecting more of this than I should.  It appears to
be written for a "young adult" level, so it could be that the formula
writing is part of the package, but I can't really recommend this book.

%A   Ballantine, Betty 
%T   The Secret Oceans
%I   Bantam
%C   New York
%D   October 1994
%G   ISBN 0-553-09660-5
%P   160pp [approx.]
%O   hardback, $29.95

--
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email-masked]
There's always an easy solution to every human problem -
neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken