Starclimber »

Kenneth Oppel is the Governor General’s Award-winning author of the Airborn series and the Silverwing Saga, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. Kenneth Oppel lives in Toronto with his wife and their three children. Visit his website at KennethOppel.com.

An exhilarating journey to the stars—or a heartbreaking battle for survival?

Pilot-in-training Matt Cruse and his love interest, Kate de Vries, an expert on high-altitude life-forms, are invited aboard the Starclimber, a vessel that literally climbs its way into the cosmos. Matt secretly plans on asking Kate to marry him, but before they even set foot aboard the ship, Kate announces her engagement—to someone else.

Despite this bombshell, and Matt's anguish, they embark on their journey into space, but soon the ship is surrounded by strange and unsettling life-forms, and the crew is forced to combat devastating mechanical failure. For Matt, Kate, and the entire crew of the Starclimber, what began as an exciting race to the stars has now turned into a battle to save their lives.

Children's Literature

This third entry in the Matt Cruse series raises the stakes by taking its hero out of the sky and up into space. In these alternate histories of the early 1900s, air travel has supplanted trains and ships. Young Matt is a sky sailor who, in the first two books, fights a pirate and helps recover a long-missing airship. In Starclimber, Matt trains to serve aboard the world's first spaceship. Following the standard format for this series, poor Matt and his wealthy love Kate DeVries discover new lifeforms and face incredible danger together. First terrorists try to sabotage the mission. Then the ship suffers mechanical failures and attracts unwanted attention from bizarre alien lifeforms. The adventure elements work very well, as usual. The romance between Kate and Matt, however, seems forced. Another suitor vies for Kate's attention, and neither Kate nor Matt seems to have considered how they would fit into each other's career and life plans. A subplot involving women's suffrage serves mostly to contribute to a stronger impression of Kate's lack of understanding of how the world works for those who do not have tremendous fortunes. Kate herself comes across as young, naive, and selfish. This impression is reinforced by the new actress voicing her. Meanwhile, the same voice actor has portrayed Matt in all three books, showing his growing maturity. The infatuation between the two seems stilted in the audio performance as a result. Reviewer: Kristina Cassidy