★★☆☆☆ Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, by Victor Appleton
Best left behind in the mists of history
Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle
Victor Appleton
Best left behind in the mists of history
I picked up Victor Appleton's Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle, or, Fun and Adventures on the Road because the Tom Swift series was spoken of fondly by the heroine of an excellent historical novel I recently read, Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
Tom Swift lives in upstate New York with his widowed father, successful inventor Barton Swift. Barton Swift wants to patent his new turbine motor, when both his model and his paperwork are stolen. Tom sets out on his new motorcycle to catch the miscreants and retrieve the stolen stuff.
It's not good. It's poorly written. The characters are thin to the point of transparency. It has one of those deplorable plots that is driven by supposedly smart people doing very stupid things. And, alas, we have the inevitable Comic Relief Darky, who is not even slightly funny.
Now you might try to argue that in its time, the Tom Swift series compared favorably to other children's books. Perhaps that is so for the later books in the series, but for this one, it won't wash. I did a quick search for children's books published between 1900 and 1920 (Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle was published in 1910), and WOW! Jackpot, man. For instance see this list on Goodreads. We have Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), The Secret Garden (1911), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Peter Pan (1911), The Wind in the Willows (1908), and the first three Anne of Green Gables novels. The list goes on from there.
Now, granted, Tom Swift was a long book series for boys, and those were thin on the ground at the beginning of the twentieth century. So I will grant it some historical significance. But there is not, in my opinion, any reason why a reader seeking amusement or enlightenment in 2025 should waste time on Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle.