My Head Is Full of Books: Retrospective Wednesday...Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

"Outside a dog a book is man's best friend, inside a dog it is too dark to read!" -Groucho Marx========="The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." -Jane Austen========="I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book."-JK Rowling========"I spend a lot of time reading." -Bill Gates=========“Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” -Jacqueline Kelly=========

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Retrospective Wednesday...Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

Retrospective Wednesday is a feature at My Head is Full of Books designed to give bloggers a chance to highlight a book that was published in previous years, in the hope that it will cause others to go back and read it. The featured book must have been published one or more years ago.

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. In the process they run into air pirates and fight to save their airship and all the passengers on board.

"In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, author Kenneth Oppel 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." -Scholastic Books

Airborn, published in 2004, is the first book of a trilogy. But unlike many books in a series, this book ends on a satisfactory note and could easily stand alone. In an feeble attempt to read all the past Printz Award and Honor books I finally made my way to Airborn and found it completely exciting and invigorating. It has a bit of the steampunk feel to it as the airship plays such an important role in the book and it is set in what appears to be the late 1900s. The other two books in the series are Skybreaker (2005) and Starclimber (2008).

Last year Airborn was optioned to a film company and Oppel is writing the screenplay, so hopefully we will get to see this high-air adventure on the big screen soon. But I am giving you fair warning. You will want to read the book first, so get to it. Scholastic books publicizes this book as a grade 6-8 book, I'd say that it could easily be of interest for students in grades 5-10. After I publish this post I am going to check to see if the library even has the other two books in the series, and if not, take care of that immediately.

Happy Reading!