Airborn

Locations
Call Number: Teen Large Print Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Large Print 4-week checkout	Teen Large Print Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Matt, a young cabin boy aboard an airship, and Kate, a wealthy young girl traveling with her chaperone, team up to search for the existence of mysterious winged creatures reportedly living hundreds of feet above the Earth's surface. Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crow's nest, being the ship's eyes. We were two nights out of Sydney, and there'd been no weather to speak of so far. I was keeping watch on a dark stack of nimbus clouds off to the northwest, but we were leaving it far behind, and it looked to be smooth going all the way back to Lionsgate City. Like riding a cloud - Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. It is the life Matt's always wanted; convinced he's lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist's granddaughter that he realizes that the man's ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious. In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Airborn review submitted by bballbobtkd9 on July 26, 2011, 6:39pm This book was full of suspense,action,drama and mystery.Readers will not be able to put it down. It is a perfect book for teenagers and Kenneth Oppel will have them begging for the next one.

teen adventure submitted by camelsamba on August 1, 2017, 8:21pm This is a great adventure story for the upper end of middle grades or young teens. Matt Cruse is a young cabin boy on a blimp-like airship flying to Australia. Kate is a very wealthy passenger, close to his age, traveling with a stick-in-the-mud chaperone that she is always trying to escape. The airship is attacked by pirates and then marooned on a tropical island after an unfortunate collision with the pirates’ ship in a storm. And since the pirates had smashed their radio, they are unable to call for help. Will the crew be able to repair the ship? Will they be able to return to the sky? The setting is approximately turn of or early 20th century, but it’s an alternative history where airships are the main transportation.

My 13yo and I were quite taken with Matt and Kate. They do seem older than their years at times, but that's easy enough to ignore. There’s a bit of a budding romance between them (despite class differences which would have made it impossible). There were times when I found myself thinking “another plot twist to overcome? be done with it already!” But the good guys win in the end (spoiler? :-) and the rush of good feelings beat out earlier frustrations. Maybe it could have been shorter; nevertheless, we persisted. We read the next book in the series, as did my 16yo, who read this after we were done.

At times I found myself comparing technology with Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy : e.g. “If only they had beasties to generate gasses for them!”