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The Digging Leviathan

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About this listen

Southern California - sunny days, blue skies, neighbours on flying bicycles ... ghostly submarines ... mermen off the Catalina coast ... and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder ... and dark conspiracies.

A place rife with adventure - if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?

©2012 James P. Blaylock (P)2012 Audible Ltd Fantasy Fiction Submarine
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Didn't enjoy this book as much as the others. It was overly wordy and not much seemed to happen and I had worked out who the villain was long before he was exposed!

Not up to his usual standard

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Would you try another book written by James P Blaylock or narrated by Christopher Ragland?

I'm considering it, on the assurance of other reviewers that this is one of the less accessible books in the series.

What could James P Blaylock have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Hard to say. I just found it hard to keep up with what was going on and found I didn't really care very much about the characters or the plot.

What three words best describe Christopher Ragland’s performance?

Not bad considering.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Mostly boredom. I usually love my audiobook sessions as I walk to work, but I had to force myself to keep going with this.

Any additional comments?

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did.

Very hard to follow

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Having just finished this book, I find myself unable to really give you much of a summary. It it a very odd book, which seems to be set in cold war era USA, following the journey of a mentally unstable man on his journey to the centre of the earth. Whether anything is actually happening, or is all imagined is still a mystery. Even though the narrator is pretty good, I found myself switching off while listening and even when I was paying attention, I was not really following. The ending is also rather abrupt, but I found myself almost glad that it had finished, so I didn't have to listen anymore.

Very Odd

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We love coca cola right? I mean as a species, generally we do. Is it the sugar? the taste? the bubbles? Probably a combination of all those things. Well, this book is so full of prose - I mean SOOO full of prose, that the actual story is lost. I couldn't follow it, I didn't enjoy it and I laboured just to listen. Can I judge it fully - no. I could only listen entirely to the first part of the download, and that took determination.

What world were they living in? Who were the people? No introductions, just a lot of over cleaver assumptions that at some point you would just get it. It took too long and I was just fed up.

So why cola at the beginning? Because prose are great in a story when used to enhance something already special, like bubbles make a coke fizzy, but a coke they do not make. This story is all bubbles. If the flavour is there, and I'm sure it is, I couldn't taste it.

pop

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This is the first Blaylock book I read and I have to admit that I am mightily impressed! It's a full on romp from the get go and has wonderful characterisation. The narration is spot on and really brings it to life. If you are a steam punk fan this has to be a must.

Ripping yarn

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