Airborn Discussion

As I’ve mentioned before, this month’s book wasn’t a typical book club book. My husband suggested it after he read and enjoyed it on our honeymoon.

At first, I was a little sceptical. Generally our tastes tend to differ as he enjoys denser, more historical based texts and I tend to be a little more into contemporary fiction, but he was so sure I’d like it that I felt compelled to check it out. After all, what’s the worst scenario in reading a book? Even if you don’t like something, you at least exercise your brain for a few hours.

Anyway, fortunately for me, not liking it was not a problem as I made it through the book in about two days. It was a bit slow-going in the beginning as they explained a lot of the technical ship stuff, but once it got into the meat of the story, it was a pretty easy and quick read.

I think the thing that struck me right away was that it seemed very much in the vein of a sort of Jules Verne/Robert Louis Stevenson type adventure story what with the island, the pirates and the crazy airship technology.

Speaking of the airship, I was actually quite pleased with how solid and relatively realistic the setting was to me. I’m not sure if it was because I’ve been on a cruise ship before, but I very much felt as Matt Cruse described his surroundings that I was able to visualize them, to imagine the layout and the feel of it all as he ran, climbed and dodged his way through its inner workings. It truly seemed to me to be a living, breathing character in the story.

But the strongest part of the book to me was the characters. I enjoyed Matt and was interested in watching his struggle to become a man while tightly holding onto the image of his father. In so many adventure books, it seems like the defacto leader is this smart, no-nonsense, self assured guy, but I liked how, while Matt seemed assured to his friends, he did have moments where he second guessed himself or wondered what his father would have done in the situation.

I also really enjoyed Kate and the fact that she was a second banana without feeling second class. One of my major pet peeves about Young Adult fiction is when a female character is shoehorned in to appeal to a demographic, only to become a flat, weak and flavourless damsel-in-distress who’d rather flit around helplessly waiting to be saved by a man than to take any initiative of her own (paging Bella Swan!). In this instance, while Kate and Matt did work together to track the cloud cats (along with poor Bruce at the end), it actually felt like a solid partnership, and I definitely felt that, had Matt been removed from the story, that she would have been just as smart and determined.

It also said something to me that, while it was obvious she liked Matt, after their kiss in the forest, the whole book didn’t suddenly become just about their “relationship” and that they both remained resolved to accomplish their original goals – Matt to save his beloved airship the Aurora and Kate to concluding her expedition and proving her grandfather right in the eyes of the scientific community.

They say that a good way to judge a book series is whether or not, after you read the first volume, you are compelled to read the following books and I think that this first story was enough fun that, even with a busy summer ahead, I’ll be making time to polish off Kenneth Oppel’s other two.

Anyway, these were my basic impressions of the book – what were yours? Did you like it? Did you feel attached to any particular character? What parts of it stood out in your mind?

Comment below and we’ll get a dialogue going!

(I’m a little bit behind because I was deathly ill last week but I’ll be putting up the poll for the next book tomorrow!)