"The Discovery," by Gordon Korman (Dive #1)

Audience: Middle Grade

Genre: Adventure

Overall Content Rating: Clean

Content Warnings

Death

Brief instance of a ship sinking, no true details but all sailors on board presumably drowned

The killing of a shark

Violence

Being knocked in the head with the handle of a whip

Routine whippings (in the past but described in diary entries)

Overall Review

In The Discovery, Korman writes about four kids chosen for an internship with a dive company, but none of them know what they're planning on doing with them. A photographer who's never photographed professionally in his life, two divers that barely know what they're doing, and one cripple who's the only experienced diver out there are sent into coral reefs looking for caves. Or so they're told. But when they find resistance and an anchor from an old sunken ship, they find much more than they thought they were getting into.

This book started very quickly, with a "diary entry" from a captain's boy before it got into the modern-day action. Ultimately, it leaves you either gripped from the beginning or putting the book down because you simply don't care, which is nearly what I did. The con of things starting so fast is that there's no time for you really to become engaged in what's happening. There's no time for you to understand who the characters are. In fact, there was barely an introduction before the story began in earnest, which made it hard to get into. However, there is some to say about that being good for a kids' book, especially for those who like to read but need action quickly before they lose their interest.

One thing that I did find that I thought might cause a problem in younger audiences, however, was something that was an issue from the beginning. This problem was honestly just the wordings that the author used, not just in normal paragraphs but also in the kids' dialogue. I'm not saying there was anything profane—far from it—but I am saying that some of the terminology that they used was far too technical even for me, who knows nothing about diving. It makes no sense to me that they would not describe these terms for kids who may know even less than I do, but such is how it was written. I suppose the details weren't too necessary to the plot in the end, but it would've been nice to fully comprehend what was happening in each scene.

Another thing I didn't appreciate was how rude some of the characters were. From the beginning, and throughout a lot of the book, the four kids seem to be at each other's throats and the adults aren't setting a very good example, either. A lot of them are grumpy and irritable, even outright lying to them and leaving them behind when they were supposed to be guiding them.

Overall, there was a large dramatized portion of this book where everything seemed unnecessarily elevated. That said, I haven't read a young kids book in a while so maybe that's how they've always been written and I've just forgotten. Ultimately, this wasn't a bad book by any means, but I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it to anyone either.