Airborn

Certainly! Here's a summary of the review:

The full cast audio narration really enhanced the experience by bringing the characters to life with remarkable skill. Oppel's storytelling shines as he weaves a captivating narrative filled with suspense, action, and romance.

The talented cast expertly portrays the characters, adding depth and authenticity to their interactions. The production quality of the audio is excellent, immersing listeners in a rich soundscape that complements the storytelling.

"Airborn" is an incredibly captivating and creative story that will appeal to readers of every age. The fusion of Oppel's exceptional storytelling and the brilliant full cast audio narration elevates the book to an extraordinary level, creating an unforgettable experience that should absolutely not be overlooked.

Fun fantasy. The ending has the possiblity of a sequel. The characters were believable and frustrating. My only qualm was the death of one of the characters. The role was so well defined.

This book is amazing! It's one of my favorites ever! I've read it over and over and never get tired of it. The characters are incredibly realistic, as are the settings and circumstances that Kenneth Oppel creates. The author's imaginative world of air-ships, sky pirates, and flying cats is extremely well written and believable. Fast paced and exciting, this is one of those books that you don't want to put down, and holds your interest from start to finish.It's sequel, "Skybreaker" is even better!This is an amazing, amazing book and I love it!

Note: This review is of the Full Cast Audio production, which includes voice actors for each part. In this slightly steampunkish 18th century world, people travel by airship. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, an airship crossing the Pacificus. He lives for flying and never feels at home on the ground. While in the crow’s nest, he spots a damaged hot air balloon. The man aboard dies shortly after being rescued, but not before talking about the beautiful creatures he spotted on his journey. A year later, the Aurora takes on a couple of late passengers, Kate de Vries and Majorie Simpkins. Kate is 15, just like Matt and they quickly start up a friendship, in which she entrusts him with her grandfather’s story of beautiful flying creatures over the Pacificus. After an attack by pirates and a terrible storm, the Aurora lands on an uncharted island. Can the crew repair her? Are they safe there from inhabitants and pirates? What really lives on this mysterious island? The story is fast-paced, with plenty of action. Despite the pace, I often found myself bored with the story. The Narrator grated on my nerves a bit, but I think that had more to do with the voice actor than the actual book. I feel like I would have enjoyed it far more had I read it rather than listened to it. Nonetheless, there were moments where I tensed up in anticipation of something about to happen, or laughed out loud at something funny a character said. I think this book would appeal especially to middle-grade kids looking for an exciting adventure story.

15 year old Matthew works as a cabin boy on a airship that cruises around the world. He meets Kate who is travelling with a chaperone and they explore the ship together. When the ship is attacked by pirates and marooned on an island, Matt and Kate are captured, escape, and save the ship.They search for sea creatures that are recorded in Kate’s grandfather’s journal.

Matt Cruse works as a cabin boy on the airship Aurora. His father, before him, worked and died on this ship and Matt himself was born on an airship. Sailing is in his blood and he feels he was born to be in the air. He befriends a girl passenger who is making her first air voyage to prove the existence of strange air creatures that her recently deceased grandfather was thought to have imagined. While making a routine voyage with a full load of passenger's and cargo they are attacked and boarded by pirates. This is the beginning of Matt and Kate's deadly adventures.I loved this book! There is not one single thing that did not appeal to me. Set in an alternate earth similar to the Victorian era only instead of sailing the seas their ships sail the skies. This is a rip-roaring, rollicking good nautical adventure that takes place in the air. Strange creatures, air pirates, shipwreck and desert islands, it is all here. A strong female character with an equally strong male character will appeal to both boys and girls. As per usual with Oppel the death scenes can bit on the gory side and this is definitely a YA book. Both an absorbing plot and wonderfully in-depth character development, along with a fully developed alternate world make this a page-turning adventure. Highly recommended. I can't wait to read the next book!

An absolutely compelling, suspenseful adventure with the glamor of airship travel at its heart. Matt Cruse works as a cabin boy aboard the Airborn. It is his home where he feels his happiest and can feel connected to his dead father who died in an airship accident. He knows every inch of the airship and aspires to be a junior sailmaker. In the opening chapter, he helps rescue a stranded air balloon. in the balloon is an older gentleman. Sick and dying, he asks Matt "Did you see them?" Matt doesn't know what he is talking about. A year later, young Kate De Vries and her chaperone are aboard the airship and Matt learns the old man was Kate's grandfather and she is on a quest to find the strange creatures her grandfather documented on his balloon travels. Pirates invade the Airborn and the damage caused to the ship forces it down on an island. It is on this island that Kate and Matt discover the creature her grandfather saw. Vivid personalities such as the elegant captain, Kate and her overbearing chaperone. Descriptions of ship life are realistic and absorbing. Constant action, great for reluctant readers. Perhaps too much derring-do a la action movies. A convincing, inviting portrayal of another world, reachable but still a fantasy.

It sounds like a cliche, but I really had a hard time putting this book down. The characters (both the good guys and the bad guys) read as real. The hints of steampunk were just enough to make it interesting, but they didn't get in the way of the real story. And the story was engaging in the extreme. (I rated it 4 stars instead of 5 because I'm not sure how rereadable this book is. Some of the enchantment I'm feeling is because of the surprises.)

This is a damn good, solid, enjoyable adventure story. The writing was nice, rightly paced and with good dialogue and description. The plot was tight, lots of twists and a lot of interesting stuff going on, a real page turner with solid writing and interesting characters. Definetley a good I would recomend. Scored a 4.5 not a 5 as, while a solid example of the genre, it doesn't do anything to try to defy the genre. Something I will note, if you've ever seen Haruhi Suzumiya, the protagonists of this are very much like Kyon and Haruhi only there isn't the horrible objectification of vulnerable women and sexism that's in those novels so if you enjoyed their dynamic in the anime where you don't have to put up with as much of Kyon's sexist by-play this book has much the same dynamic.

This is an amazing book, and one of my favorites. a young cabin boy named Matt is working on the airship and one of it's passengers, a young girl named Kate, mentions her grandfather and that he died in his airship while looking for some mysterious animal no one else has seen. Matt had rescued that man, right before he died, and Kate believes that she will find this animal for her grandfather. Their airship crashes, and Kate thinks it is a perfect opportunity to explore the island they landed on for the beings that her grandfather claimed to have seen right before he died. So they go off in search of the mysterious "cloud cat..."

Young Adult fiction – I don’t even like the term. In the last decade, bookstores have swelled with novels that were written for and marketed to – and even sometimes written by – a narrow age range of people, let’s say pre-adolescent to early-high school aged. Championed by glittery, angst-ridden vampires and bow-and-arrow toting teen gladiators, I firmly believe that the phenomenon was largely created by publishing house marketing departments who saw more dollar signs than they did good writing. Just twenty or thirty years ago, anyone in that age range would have been reading Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc. And they would have done so without any thought about whether the book was meant for a person of a particular age or not. I’ve heard teachers and parents excoriate the electronic age because they think they can’t get their children to read anything more than 140 characters at a time. So, they push fantastic, and largely dumbed down, tales that they know will soon be featured on a towering screen down at the multi-plex, where the biggest moral issue will be whether the hunky werewolf or the foppish vampire gets the girl. Into this world of watered down writing comes Kenneth Oppel’s new novel – the first in a trilogy probably because three movies based on three books is a franchise – [Airborn]. Oppel himself was a fledging writer in his Young Adult life, having his story Coolin’s Fantastic Video Adventure published after it made its way to Roald Dahl. So, it’s no surprise that [Airborn] is a work firmly entrenched in the Young Adult world with a teen hero and ingénue trying to world and save the world when all of the adults seem to be acting stuidly.[Airborn] follows the adventures of Matt Cruse, a cabin boy on an airship – think Hindenburg. In this semi-dystopian alternate history, most travel is conducted on airships that are kept aloft by hydrium, a gaseous element lighter than hydrogen. Matt’s father was a sailmaker – the person an airship who monitors the containers of hydrium and patches the skin of the airship – when he fell into the ocean. The captain makes Matt a cabin boy to help him feed his family back home and to give him his father’s trade. On a routine cruise to Australia, Matt befriends Kate DeVries, who is on board hoping to find an island where her adventuring grandfather once spotted a flying cat creature. Soon, into the trip they are attacked by pirates who damage the airship, forcing it to make an emergency landing on an uncharted island. Matt and Kate make an amazing scientific discovery on the island and defeat the pirates without any adult help whatsoever.Don’t get me wrong, I like a little swash-buckling, otherworldly adventure, whether on the open sea or in the air. But Robert Louis Stevenson and H.P. Lovecraft and Patrick O’Brian have written these stories already, and they did so without any need to dumb down the prose or simplify the story. To be fair, Oppel has the beginnings of an intriguing story, but in targeting a particular reading age, the writing isn’t challenging in any way and the story is predictable, things that can never be said of Stevenson, Lovecraft, O’Brian, and a host of other great writers. [Airborn] wasn’t a bad book – it kept my interest. But it wasn’t that good either. That seems to be what Young Adult fiction often shoots for.What’s even more troubling is that the back of the book has a list of awards the book has won. Is this really the best we have to offer our kids? Are we dumbing them down by offering them dumbed down reading options? The answer to the first question is a resounding, “No.” Sadly, I don’t know how to answer the second question. I’m happy to see an explosion of reading interest, even if it is misogynistic love triangles between humans, werewolves, and vampires or teenagers killing each other in an arena spectator sport. But I hope that there is as much enthusiasm for youngsters fighting looters in caves and traveling down-river aboard a raft, because these stories were much smarter and challenged readers of all ages to face bigger issues than who gets the girl.Bottom Line: Young adult fiction aboard a Hindenburg-like airship – the young adult part tells you pretty much all you need to know.3 bones!!!!!

Airships: the magical, interesting, mechanical realm. The book did a great job of bringing them to life, and I hesitate to go with 4 stars only because of the main female character. She's spunky and adventuresome, and singlehandedly responsible for every bad decision in the book. This became irritating after a while, especially given her consistent need to be rescued despite her spunky and adventuresome character.

The airship Aurora, though, is a complex an beautiful character in her own right, and that is extremely satisfying.

Teen fiction; sci-fi/fantasy swashbuckling adventure. Great story and character development, some violence (pirates!) and one kissing scene.

3.75 stars

This book didn't catch my attention for awhile. Near the end, I really enjoyed it. I think a younger reader will love it throughout. It has an airship that's more like our cruise ships. There are pirates and flying creatures. The leads are a boy and girl trying to find an unknown animal and save the day. It has lots of adventure.

I loved every minute of this amazing book! The audio version is by Full Cast Audio, and they made the book and characters come vividly to life. Finishing it made me feel the way you do after an exquisite meal--you want to go right back and eat the whole thing again. If you like YA adventures, put this one at the top of your list. You won't be disappointed.

This was great! Fast paced, and young adult but not all about hormones. I'm reading the second one now.

Entertaining, YA full cast audio book, adventure, steampunk, alternate history, steampunk, pirates and strange creatures. I found the willful, rich girl to be a bit annoying but overall, mostly this is a fun to read book that I can fully recommend. There are about 3 kisses in the book, so a bit of romance but mostly a boys adventure book.

This was my streampunk book for one of my reading challenges this year, and I probably wouldn’t have read it if not for the prompt, but I am really glad I did.This was a fun, adventure-filled YA romp, and the audio is excellent... a full cast recording with music between chapters. It was like listening to a movie.

The story is fun on the surface, but it's just a re-skinned pirate story with a steampunk setting. The addition of the "angels" was interesting, but not enough to make me invested in the series in any way.

In this blend of fantasy and adventure, young Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the airship Aurora. The ship is more home to him than the ground, and he dreams of being sailmaker one day. On one fateful trip, he meets a determined young woman named Kate who is looking for a strange flying creature no one but her grandfather has seen.I would've enjoyed this book a lot as a kid - an adventurous voyage including a bout with pirates, close escapes, and a dash of humor with the fantasy elements. It's still enjoyable as an adult, but perhaps because it took me three weeks to listen to the audio I didn't feel as in the moment or invested in the characters as I might've in my younger years. A fun, fast-paced read.

This book is full of exciting on an airship. While the adventures kept me reading, the overarching mystery that should have healed the book together just seemed to far fetched and not particularly urgent. Still, it's the kind of story that holds the readers attention with narrow escapes and engaging characters.

Matt Cruze is a a ships boy aboard the Aurora, a passenger airship. His father worked and died aboard the Aurora and that is where Matt dreams of spending his days. Then he meets a girl name Kate, the ship is attacked by pirates and they crash on island in the middle of the ocean way of course. Kate and Matt find a new creature.

I'll have to add a better summary later. Suffice to say that there is a ton of action in this book. The full cast recording is amazing and Matt and Kate are amazing characters. Bruce is also wonderful and I did wish that his life had gotten more on track. Cloud cats are a brilliant idea. I love seeing the creative escapes and I also wish some of the pirates had come to a better end as I have romantic notions about pirates not being all bad.

Interesting.

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel is the first of the Matt Cruse series. Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the luxury airship Aurora. He was born on an airship (a rare occurance) and his father died working on the Aurora. Matt, now, desperately wants to have the career taken from his father but a newly appointed Academy graduate has taken the job of assistant sail maker.Now into the mix of this coming of age story of a cabin boy learning a hard lesson, add a heaping scoop of Robert Louis Stevenson pirates with a heathy dollop of the lost world exploration of a Jules Verne story. To top it off, frost it with a plucky young woman with a thirst for adventure.All of this adventure is set in an alternate world. Oppel does a wonderful job of fleshing out this world, starting with the recognizable (the destination — Australia). Then he adds in the details, new names for oceans, a mango scented element needed for lighter than air travel. And finally he tosses in the unexplored — creatures even the people of the Pacificus don't know about.As it happens, I listened to the audio — twice. It was produced by Fullcast Audio. While I appreciate their desire to turn a ripping yarn into a theatric production, I think they often go too far. Matt Cruse who serves both as narrator and protagonist, suffers from the usual problem of these Fullcast Audio performances: too much earnestness.The written word has moments of rest, of the quietly mundane — passages that should be read quietly, and perhaps with some flatness of voice. NEVER can one of these performers do that. I suspect they are directed to act each and every word with complete heart and soul. It comes off as insincere, melodramatic and sometimes slap worthy.

Really liked this adventure story. The fantasy elements are handled well and I think the interpersonal struggles of the main characters are not overly done. It was really fun to read.

Not quite classical Steampunk, not quite YA Sci-Fi, Airborn is the opening novel in a series by Kenneth Oppel. Set in an alternate past where airplanes, as we know them, were never developed and instead, floating airships ruled the skyways, Airborn is the saga of a young cabin boy, Matt Cruse, obviously destined for greater things.In this opening novel, Matt makes the acquaintance of Kate De Vries, the young daughter of a wealthy family. As expected, Matt and Kate are opposites. Also as expected, they find an attraction between them, more than is required for this one story. This is a story played out against a society of almost Victorian morals, so at least for this adventure, there is nothing more than an “adventure buddy” vibe to their relationship . . . although there are a few earnest, but well deserved, chaste kisses, indicating that we will be seeing more of the pair as the series progresses.All in all, I enjoyed the story. There was something about the style, though that kept me from elevating it any higher, yet I did not feel obligated to see the story through to the end, I honestly wanted to find out what happens next. Will I read the next installment? Yes, if for no other reason than to see if the story improves. Not original enough to be more than a four star read, it is still worth acquiring and reading.

I quite liked this story about airships and mysterious creatures.

A rip-roaring adventure...airships, "cloud cats," pirates, shipwrecked...need I say more?

Airborn is a young adult adventure novel following in the footsteps of Jules Verne. Set in an alternate reality setting, we follow Matt Cruse, cabin boy on the Aurora, as he experiences his first adventure with Kate DeVries.I liked the character of Matt. His personal story is woven throughout the novel giving him depth and credibility. Fatherless after losing his dad in an airship accident, Matt struggles with the death of his father, trying hard to emulate his dad and constantly struggling to deal with the realization that his father is no longer there. This story takes Matt into the path of Kate DeVries, a wealthy passenger on his ship. Kate is on a mission which sets up the adventure she and Matt experience. I did not care for her character, although the author did a fine job of showing Kate as a pampered, selfish, manipulative young girl. At one point in the story she says that she caused all this trouble....and you know what....she did!Of course if you have an airship you have to have airship pirates of which there is a particularly nasty one in this story. I like what the author does with Captain Szpirglas by adding a son to the mix. It now makes the antagonist become more human throwing the reader a curveball in their impressions of him.Overall a good read. Lots of chasing and escaping, moments of exhilaration and moments of sadness. A little slow in the beginning but it does pick up to become a great adventure.

Excellent Stevenson or Verne. Very nearly not at all fantastical, yet utterly exhilarating.