I picked this book up at the thrift shop. It was published in 1970 and the target audience was probably around age 10 to 12 years old. I think it deserves somewhere around 3 or 4 out of 5.
The main character in this book is Tommy. As a backstory, Tommy’s mother has died and his father has lost his job, so his father decided that it would be easier for his family to survive if it is split up. Tommy moves to San Diego to live with his Uncle Mike and become his lab assistant. Throughout the story, Tommy has feelings of missing his family, but all together maintains a positive outlook and good attitude about working hard as a lab assistant to earn his keep at his uncle’s house.
Uncle Mike’s profession is something like a marine biologist. Mike takes his daughter Jill to the tide pools when the tide is low to collect small fish and other ocean creatures, then he takes them home and preserves them with chemicals in his basement laboratory. He receives orders from schools or other places for the creatures that he preserves, and selling them is how he makes a living. After Tommy arrives in San Diego, he joins Mike and Jill on their trips to collect different marine life at the tide pools.
The key plot point of the story is that someone has planted fish in Uncle Mike’s samples that are illegal to catch. Throughout the story, it’s not clear who exactly is trying to get Mike in trouble. In addition, someone is stealing sandwiches and drinks when Jill and Tommy are visiting the tide pools, and someone also steals a seahorse from them. It takes a while for the story to resolve who is behind these different things, and there are several different suspects. In addition, Jill’s friend Woody is joining them at the tide pools and searching for old bits of pottery in a kind of archeological dig, and that also gets wrapped into the story. Overall it ends up reading a lot like an episode of Scooby Doo, or maybe something similar to a book from a series like Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, as the children try to look for clues in some spooky underground military tunnels near the coast.
I enjoyed the book but not enough that I would be likely to read it again. The most interesting part of the book from my point of view was the tunnels near San Diego. I am not familiar with that area since I have never visited California. I’m curious to learn more about those tunnels. A quick online search brought up multiple articles about secret underground tunnels near that area, so apparently these do really exist.
星女 