In which Great Britain (& the Solar System) are Menaced by a Mad Naturalist and an Ancient Race of GIANT SPIDERS, but are SAVED (Huzzah!) by a Boy, his Sister, a PIRATE, Richard Burton, Telepathic Sea Anemones, &c &c &c.
Steampunk for the juvenile set: this audiobook was, as advertised, a lark.
Written in the breathless cliffhanger-to-cliffhanger style of an old sci-fi serial, Larklight takes place in an alternate universe in which Isaac Newton discovered the means of space travel and Her Majesty Queen Victoria reigns over an empire extending past Mars to the moons of Jupiter.
The narration trades back and forth between young Art Mumby, who has just survived an inexplicable giant-spider attack on his family’s spaceship, and his extremely proper sister Myrtle. Escaping, they take up with Captain Jack Havock, the 15-year-old terror of the Aetheric Main, and his crew of escaped specimens from the Royal Xenological Institute, learn that the attack on their home was just part of a larger plan to destroy Great Britain (& the solar system), and eventually make it to London just in time for the Great Exhibition, which is… ok, no spoilers, even for a book in which spiders wear bowler hats… but that scene alone is worth the price of admission.
Starting with the endpapers, a perfect pastiche of the ads in a 19th-century interplanetary newspaper, and continuing through the longwinded chapter headings, Philip Reeve does Victoriana spot-on. The characters have the gift of stiff-upper-lip understatement. Father has been et by spiders? How… disagreeable.
Aiming at a younger audience than Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles, Larklight fires off jokes for several generations, from flying pigs used as low-gravity vacuum cleaners to references to Star Trek and H.G. Wells. The action bounces right along from peril to peril, powered by its own enthusiasm.
I enjoyed the audiobook; the book also has illustrations, but Reeve’s writing is so visual and detailed that you won’t need them. And look! there’s a sequel, being cataloged as I write. Huzzah!
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