I was wandering around the stacks (which is really difficult with two small kids, but I’ve mentioned that before), looking for something for M (this is sounding really familiar… have I written this already?) and I spotted this book. I thought, “Hey, Fuse reviewed this a while back, and she liked it” and so I snatched it up.

I’ve never read anything else by Philip Reeve before (having never heard of him), and so this was my first go at his writing. And…

It took me a while to get into the book. I kept reading chapters and thinking “well, I’ll give it just one more chapter”. I think I did that for nearly 3/4 of the book (near the end, the action picked up enough that I quit being distracted by the amount of detail about the world). I found it amusing enough — though I was often reminded of Lemony Snickett’s humor, which didn’t really appeal to me all that much — but what I really had a hard time with was the world it was set in: 19th-century space. Yeah, you read that right. The British Empire, in it’s full glory in outer space. The book is full of space creatures (both sentient and non), Martians, Ionians, other weird creature-type things, flying boats, chemical weddings (how the ships propel themselves through space), evil spiders… it took me a long time to get used to the world. And when I finally did, well, it was still just weird.

I enjoyed Art and Myrtle and Jack as characters, though I think Myrtle was way underused. I really liked the chapter titles. I loved the illustrations. But aside from that, there wasn’t much to catch my fancy.

But then, I’m not a 10-year-old boy. Maybe if I was, I’d like this one a whole lot.

Updated to add: I was telling a friend about this one, trying to describe it, and she said, “Oh! Kind of like Treasure Planet?” Having never seen it, I couldn’t say for sure… so, I got it from Netflix, and watched it over the weekend. Now I can say, yeah, this book is a LOT like Treasure Planet. In fact, the basic premise is the same as Treasure Planet: 70 percent traditional with 30 percent modern/industrial/space. There’s some significant differences (one being that Treasure Planet is based upon Treasure Island), but there’s a lot of similarities, too. Kind of eerie, if you ask me.