Readers should compile one list of clues that reveal the era (styles of dress, existing technology) and another that charts the differences between the story's fantastical reality and ours. The story seems to be set in the teens of the 20th century, though it’s an alternate and parallel time. Readers, both boys and girls, will live these adventures vicariously-a flying airship a heartthrob cabin boy not afraid of heights, crushing on the magnificent Kate, fiercely guarded by her overprotective governess terrifying encounters with the merciless pirate, Szpirglas survival on a desert island and the discovery of those beautiful flying creatures, cloud cats. What creatures might the man have been talking about, Matt wonders? One year later, Matt encounters that very Kate, Benjamin Malloy’s granddaughter, Kate de Vries, a vibrant, headstrong, and wealthy young heiress, just his age, who hopes to verify the sketches and descriptions of the mysterious "beautiful creatures" her late grandfather wrote about in his logbook. Would’ve loved them.” An hour later, he dies. The sixty-year-old pilot, Benjamin Malloy, who had been attempting to float around the world, comes to and asks Matt, “Did you see them?.
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.Aboard the gargantuan airship, Aurora, riding high above the Pacificus, heading from Sydney to Lionsgate City, 15-year-old cabin boy, Matt Cruse, helps to rescue an unconscious man in a hot air balloon that is listing in the night sky.
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. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. 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.
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.
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. We were two nights out of Sydney, and there'd been no weather to speak of so far. Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crow's nest, being the ship's eyes.
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