Journey to the Centre of the Earth: Or a Planet Full of Secrets

by Jules Verne, Antonis Papatheodoulou (Retold by), Iris Samartzi (Illustrator)

Overview

A secret message put Axel and his uncle, Otto Lidenbrock, professor of mineralogy, into great adventures, leading them to descend all the way to the center of the earth! I carefully took the book in my hands, when suddenly through its pages slipped a small piece of paper folded in four. It was a secret message, the beginning of a great adventure for me and my uncle Otto Lidenbrock—the famous professor of mineralogy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781916409187
Publisher:	Faros Books
Publication date:	06/01/2020
Series:	Jules Verne's Adventure Stories
Edition description:	New
Pages:	36
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	5 - 7 Years

About the Author

Jules Verne is the author of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Antonis Papatheodoulou has won the International Compostela Prize for picture books 2016, the Greek State Picturebook Award 2011 and 2012, the Illustrated Children’s Book Award of Diavazo literary magazine , the Illustrated Book Award of the Greek section of IBBY 2012 and the Non Fiction Award of the Greek section of IBBY 2015. Four of his titles have been included in the White Ravens list. Iris Samartzi's One Last Letter won The Compostela 2016 International Prize.

Date of Birth:

February 8, 1828

Date of Death:

March 24, 1905

Place of Birth:

Nantes, France

Place of Death:

Amiens, France

Education:

Nantes lycée and law studies in Paris

Editorial Reviews

2020-03-15
An abbreviated retelling, translated from Greek, of the Jules Verne classic, illustrated with suitably adventuresome montages.

Papatheodoulou leaves out no significant events from the plot of the original, beginning with the coded message (here in reverse printed English rather than Latin) that sends Axel and his uncle on the titular journey. With a silent local guide, they head down a certain tunnel mouth in Iceland, past encounters with giant mushrooms and battling prehistoric sea monsters, to a dramatic reemergence through an erupting volcano off Sicily. Adding map fragments and clipped photos of spelunking gear to painted views of the white trio feeling their way through dimly lit passages and strange landscapes, Samartzi ably captures the original’s exhilarating sense of wonder. That sense comes through just as strongly in the co-published retelling of From the Earth to the Moon, though this version abruptly cuts off before the proto-astronauts’ return to Earth—and, more significantly, repeatedly works in a concept not found in Verne’s novel, that the whole lunar expedition is founded on the notion of turning a weapon of war to (as the subtitle has it) a “Cannon for Peace.” Journey offers a truer taste of the iconic author’s exhilarating vision than From the Earth, which is in essence a reboot that forcibly transforms the more martial original’s thematic swords into plowshares.

Together with its companion, quick voyages down and up, but both grandly visionary. (Picture book. 7-10)

Kirkus Reviews