Larklight
Philip Reeve
Bloomsbury
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+
DESCRIPTION: Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's remarkable discoveries, the British Empire has dominated the spaceways with its monopoly on aethership travel, with Her
Majesty's Realm extending from its Earthly holdings to the moons of Jupiter. Even in the great, dark reaches of space, however, the orbital manor house of Larklight is a
quaint backwater, the sort of out-of-the-way place where nothing ever happens. Here, Art and Myrtle Mumby live with their father, a grief-stricken man who buries himself in
studies of icthyoform animals that swim in the aether of space. Myrtle longs to visit London, to learn to be a proper lady, while Art secretly longs for the kinds of adventures
he reads about.
Then, one morning, Art woke to find the house blanketed in spiderwebs, with a bloated arachnid calling itself Mr Webster knocking on Larklight's door. With their father
captured, Art and Myrtle escape, but their adventures are only just beginning. Before they're through, the Mumby children will have survived the horrors of the lunar
Potter Moth, endured captivity among space pirates, visited the deserts of Mars and the storms of Jupiter, and peered into the mysteries of the Cosmos while fighting enemies
older than the Earth itself.
And all without a decent spot of tea...
REVIEW: I read glowing reviews on Amazon, and the premise looked intriguing. The first chapter establishes a marvelously inventive universe, with Victorian ideas of
the nature of space (as a life-filled "aether" between the stars) and such. Ink illustrations by David Wyatt add a certain old-school charm. Unfortunately, in Chapter 2,
invention gave way to silliness, and I started growing weary of the protagonists. Art and Myrtle epitomize the principles of the Victorian Englishman and -woman, stuffed
to the gills with pompous superiority and little but disdain for any nation, race, or species other than their own. Throughout their many adventures, they remain firmly mired in
their British mindset, with only the smallest hint of softening in their stiff upper lips and ramrod spines - not even when aliens save their worthless little tails time and
again. I understand that Reeves was writing a parody of Victorian adventure tales, that the over-the-top Britishness of Art and Myrtle (and other characters) played into that.
It didn't make it any easier to suffer through the story with them. Meanwhile, the plot quickly devolves into bluster and noise, full of silly details and even more silly alien
life-forms that caper across the pages with the simple lines and levity of a cartoon. Nobody good (or even neutral) actually dies, for all the danger and gunfire; in a universe
where taking a stroll in outer space won't kill you, I suppose not much will. This pulled the teeth from the tension, not to mention its attempts to build a sympathetic past
for its persecuted pirate crew; they were supposed to have fled for their lives into a life of crime, but in a world without mortal peril, how is it possible for a life
to be endangered?
In the end, while I can appreciate the wild imagination and the attempts at humor, Larklight overstays its welcome with unsympathetic characters and a plot that simply
won't let the good guys fail.
You might also enjoy:
A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fiction - A Civil War veteran finds himself transported to the hostile, dying world of Mars)
The Star Rigger series (Jeffrey A. Carver, Fiction - Interstellar ships navigate hyperspace with lucid-dream imagery)
Space Station ICE-3 (Bruce Coville, YA Fiction - A boy on an orbital space station uncovers a deadly mystery)
The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme series (Elizabeth Haydon, YA Fiction - A diminutive Nain's thirst for adventure lands him in all manner of trouble)
With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (Rudyard Kipling, Fiction - A journey aboard a postal dirigible in a blimp-dominated future)
The Piratica series (Tanith Lee, YA Fiction - In an alternate Earth, a teen girl sets sail to become an honorable pirate queen)
The Enchanted Castle (E. Nesbit, YA Fiction - Three English schoolchildren find a summer of adventure with a magic ring)
The Seventh Tower series (Garth Nix, YA Fiction - In a world of living shadows and light magic, a boy discovers a dark threat)
The Airborn books (Kenneth Oppel, YA Fiction - An alternate-Earth boy rides hydrium airships into the unexplored wonders of the stratosphere... and beyond)
Boneshaker (Cherie Preist, YA Fiction - An inventor's massive drill unleashes zombie-creating gases beneath Gold Rush-era Seattle)
The Leviathan trilogy (Scott Westerfield, YA Fiction - An alternate-history World War I pits German "Clanker" machinery against "Darwinist" fabricated life-forms)
The Dragonback Adventures (Timothy Zahn, YA Fiction - An interstellar thief reluctantly partners with a threatened dragonlike alien to stop a genocide)
Return to Top of Page - Return to Book Review List
Return to Brightdreamer Books Home
Brightdreamer Books is created and maintained by TBW, a.k.a. "Brightdreamer."
E-mail: tbweber AT comcast DOT net. (Remove spaces, replace AT with "@" and DOT with "." - please put "Brightdreamer Books" in the subject line, or your e-mail may be deleted as
spam! Thank you!