Larklight : : or the Revenge of the White Spiders! or to Saturn's Rings and Back! : a Rousing Tale of Dauntless Pluck in the Farthest Reaches of Space
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In an alternate Victorian England, young Arthur and his sister Myrtle, residents of Larklight, a floating house in one of Her Majesty's outer space territories, uncover a spidery plot to destroy the solar system.
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS
British Empire extends to space submitted by KathyD on August 3, 2011, 7:17pm This is the first in a series of three, recommend that you read it first. It's the late 1800s, and the British Empire extends throughout the solar system. Aliens, pirates, giant spiders make for a fun adventure.
Victorian Science Fiction
submitted by Jan Wolter on June 22, 2013, 2:07pm
Larklight and it's sequels are amazingly fun, written with reckless imagination. Reeves starts with the absurd premise a Victorian British Empire that spans to Solar System, and shovels in anything else he thinks might be fun: space fish, a boy pirate captain, aliens, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the HMS Indefatigable, major planetary features recruited as characters, the Crystal Place, giant robots, and even the odd flying pig. But silly as it is, it hangs together and makes a good story. Bits, like the Captain's backstory, are quite touching. The illustrations are also wonderful.
The character of Myrtle is a bit of a problem, as she's whiny and unpleasant. Reeve's got good heroines in some of his other books, but I guess he wanted Myrtle to be a Victorian girl, so she's obsessed with behaving like a proper Victorian girl. Of course, underneath all that proper behavior is a force of nature that can level mountains, so maybe it's a good thing she's so repressed.
PUBLISHED
New York : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006.
Year Published: 2006
Description: 400 p.
Language: English
Format: Book
READING LEVEL
Lexile: 1170
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
1599900203
ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Wyatt, David.
SUBJECTS
Science fiction.