The Adventure of the Ring of Stones

A mysterious journal, a giant priceless ball of ambergris and adventure on the high seas. These main plot points are what drives this steampunkish book of adventure and daring, told from first-person perspective in this very short work. Gilbert Frobisher comes across a birding journal and, in it, learns the location of a giant ball of ambergris that could be worth its weight in gold. He encourages his friends – who readily agree with little hesitation – to sail almost around the world to capture this priceless artifact. Along the way, he faces people who would kill for this, and a giant octopus that thinks it is King Kong. The characters try to make nature bend to man, but fall short. The chapters are short and the writing easy to follow and understand.

This is an extremely short book, and the characters are not fully fleshed out. Even the main bad character is nothing more than a caricature, and the “good” people you rarely get to know beyond a few lines and little character development. The action scenes are a bit muddy, and kind of hard to follow.