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Note: all the titles listed in the title of this review should have “Adventure” added to the one-word partial titles, i.e., Underwater Adventure, African Adventure, and so on.
I think I have said it in other reviews: it is somewhat rare that an author is good at writing children’s books and adult books. Authors do try to produce both kinds of novels but not that many are successful at both. Willard Price (1887-1983), was a Canadian-American author, who started out as a lay Methodist preacher and evangelist. He subsequently worked as a reformer, working with and writing articles about subjects such as exploitative child labor and unsafe working conditions. Price finally became a successful travel-writer, roaming the globe and writing about his experiences in popular adult non-fiction books. He stated in one of his autobiographies that at times, probably around World War II, he provided information that he had collected around the world to US intelligence agencies.
In 1951, Price started writing juvenile fiction about his heroes, the Hunt family: father John Hunt, 18-year-old son Hal, and 13-year-old son Roger. The Hunt family are animal collectors. They travel around the world to find animals for zoos, animals such as anaconda snakes, monkeys, gorillas, lions, tigers, elephants, and so many more. Mr. Hunt has passed his deep knowledge of animals to his sons, who help him in this business. The author used his extensive travel experience, gained by travelling three times around the world and visiting 148 countries, to add realistic local color to the Adventure books in this 14-volume series. The books are very accurate, circa the 1950s and 1960s, as to geography, local conditions, and animal habitats and habits. Each well-written story is very exciting and quite hard to put down!
I discovered these books in about 6th grade but only found out about the whole series when I was finding them for our children. Middle school and high school readers would probably be right for this series, but a very good upper elementary school reader would also enjoy them.
For the potential readers of this series, the order in which they should be perused is: Amazon Adventure, South Sea Adventure, Underwater Adventure, Volcano Adventure, Whale Adventure, African Adventure, Elephant Adventure, Safari Adventure, Lion Adventure, Gorilla Adventure, Diving Adventure, Cannibal Adventure, Tiger Adventure, and Arctic Adventure.