Front cover image for Airborn

Airborn

Matt, a young cabin boy aboard an airship, and Kate, a wealthy young girl traveling with her chaperon, team up to search for the existence of mysterious winged creatures reportedly living hundreds of feet above the Earth's surface. Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crow's nest, being the ship's eyes. We were two nights out of Sydney, and there'd been no weather to speak of so far. 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. Like riding a cloud. 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. 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. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonists 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. 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
Print Book, English, 2005, c2004
1st paperback ed View all formats and editions
EOS, New York, 2005, c2004
Adventure stories
501, 23 p. : ill. ; 18 cm.
9780060531829, 9780060531805, 9780060846244, 9780756947941, 0060531827, 0060531800, 0060846240, 0756947944
1027682966
Ship's Eyes
Up Ship!
Kate
Hot Chocolate for Two
Log of the Endurance
Szpirglas
Sinking
Island
Bones
Shipshape
One That Fell
Shipwrecked
Hydrium
Nest
Cloud Cat
Rescue
Pit
Ship Taken
Airborne
Airborn
At Anchor
"Michael L. Printz honor book"--P. [4] of cover