"Larklight"

I seldom read Young Adult novels, but not because of some literary snobbism. I don’t do snobbism. It’s just that there are already so many non-YA novels awaiting my hungry peepers. Still, when Rixo’s Susan de Guardiola posted about Philip Reeve’s Larklight here in October 2008, I acquired it. Nearly one year later, after wading thru other books and magazines and such, I finally read the novel.

The story begins in 1851, in a British manor called Larklight, where young Art Mumby and his sister Myrtle live with their widowed father. Larklight is not your usual house though: it resides in orbit around the Moon. Also, most of our solar system’s planets and satellites are teeming with alien species, which live under the rule of the British Empire, thanks to the alchemical engines invented by Isaac Newton long ago. After Larklight is attacked by giant spiders whose leader wears a bowler hat, our young heroes find themselves running for their lives on the Moon, inside Jupiter’s giant sentient storm called Thunderhead, and all the way to Saturn's Rings. With the help of Richard Burton, Warlord of Mars, and especially with the multi-species crew of Jack Havock, space pirate, they eventually find out why their arachnoid assailants want the key to Larklight.

It’s a fun story. Fluffy most of the time, but with jabs at colonialism. It should make an interesting movie, especially visually. Shekhar Kapur apparently will direct, by the way. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the man behind Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age.