In fact, I didn't realize until after I had listened to it that it won a 2007 Audie Award. I'm so glad I decided to listen to the Full Cast Audio production of this young adult novel. If you enjoy this series I think you may also enjoy Arabella of Mars. I'd only hesitate with very young children because of the deaths, and the pirates may be scary for them. I think this would be a great book to read to kids that were not old enough to read it themselves. The protagonist, 15 year old Matt, is likable, responsible, honest and the story is well written.įor parents - There wasn't anything in it to give parents pause - except for a few deaths in the battles with the pirates - a couple good guys, a few bad guys, but although there were sad deaths (the good guys) nothing was too graphic. I wouldn't assume girls wouldn't like this one. It might appear to be more of a 'boy book', but there is a main character who is a girl, so there's someone girls can relate to, and a bit of wholesome romance.

It takes place in an alternate history of our world - so it may be classified as fantasy, but it is not really a fantasy story - it's an adventure story. And they did.Īirborn is about a cabin boy on an passenger air ship. I got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take me on, and try to sell my story. I never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but he read my story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. We had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of my favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl my story. It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and I rewrote it the next summer.

I started out writing sci-fi epics (my Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (my Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during my video game phase). and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding I wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect). I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C.

Airborn novel