The Rival Submarines cover

The Rival Submarines

Rating 2.9
Word count
531K words
Chapters
54

Tags

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Rival Submarines by Percy F. WestermanAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Mar 20, 2013

Editor's review

This is a young-adult adventure novel by the British author Percy F. Westerman, centered on submarines and typical of early technological adventure fiction. The story revolves around rivalry between submarines and adventures at sea; it moves at a brisk pace and carries a strong flavor of the era's technological imagination and boy-hero narrative. As a public-domain e-book, its value lies more in showing the appeal of early twentieth-century popular reading for young people and the tradition of maritime adventure, making it suitable as light reading and English extensive reading material. Readers may note the gap between the submarine technology imagined then and the reality today, and may compare it with other works in the tradition of juvenile adventure fiction.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • Young readers who enjoy sea and submarine adventure stories
  • Learners who want English extensive reading and prefer plot-driven texts
  • Readers interested in early technological adventure fiction and the history of popular fiction
  • Readers looking for light public-domain reading for leisure

Not a good fit for

  • Readers expecting hard military-technical detail and realistic submarine combat
  • Readers who prefer serious fiction with strong literary quality and psychological depth
  • Readers sensitive to the era's prejudices in early juvenile adventure narratives

Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to grasp the relationships and the central conflict, then follow the plot.
  2. Treat it as English extensive reading; skip unfamiliar nautical and mechanical words at first and look them up later.
  3. After reading, compare it with what you know about submarines today and consider the gap between technological imagination a century ago and reality.
  4. Read it alongside other adventure novels by the same author to observe how his narrative formulas repeat and vary.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54

FAQ

Who wrote this book, and what kind of book is it?
The author is Percy F. Westerman, a prolific British writer of juvenile adventure novels. The Rival Submarines is a young-adult adventure novel on a submarine theme, emphasizing plot and adventures at sea rather than rigorous military-technical description.
Does the submarine description in the book match real technology?
The book was written long ago, and its imagination of submarine technology bears clear marks of its time, differing from today's submarine engineering and combat reality. It should be read as technological imagination in popular adventure fiction, not as a technical reference; readers interested in the real history of submarines should look for specialist works.
Is it suitable for learning English?
It can serve as English extensive reading material. The text is plot-driven and the narrative is straightforward, but it contains nautical and mechanical vocabulary and older English usage. Aim mainly at understanding the plot rather than looking up every word; afterwards you can compile high-frequency nautical words to improve your extensive reading efficiency.

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