Book 2 of the mesmerizing series The Edge Chronicles. Please read my review here, as my review covers the entire series as a whole:
https://www.librarything.com/work/173650/reviews/228030778 ( )

Here's what I liked about this book: the names! the characters were funny and clever and so close to real - such as the flatheads - that I'm not 100% sure they're not real. I like the way the problem is set up - it's a vicious circle, rather like the world we know today, but simplified. I like the unexpected but logical turns which the story took. But most of all I like the attempt to imagine nonviolent solutions, and so I'm creating a new shelf for this kind of imagination which we need so desperately. (pages 323-324 and 363-367 illustrate the point.) ( )

Not a bad book much better than the first one in this series. ( )

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Title: Stormchaser
Series: The Edge Chronicles
Author: Chris Riddell & Paul Stewart
Rating: of 5 Battle Axes
Genre: Children's SFF
Pages: 402
Format: Kindle







Synopsis: Twig is now reunited with his father, who promptly leaves him behind to go have a grand adventure. Twig ends up saving the adventure, the academy, the town and becomes a ship captain in his own right. My Thoughts: I just lost my whole review of because of one ill advised, not meant to be, swipe of my touchpad on my laptop. I liked this, more than the previous book. It wasn't so random, had Twig acting like the young man he is and ended with the bad guys getting theirs while Twig got a sky ship and a crew. Now I am looking forward to more of this series. " ( )

It's been a good while since I read the first book in this series, but I didn't have too many difficulties picking things up. This really is the far side of the world from Alan Garner's increasingly atmospheric and enigmatic style of fantasy. This is a sturdy, intricate piece of world-building, fully grounded and downright anti-romantic in its, for a narrow sense of the word, realism. There's the geography, all connected, the flora, the fauna, the city, the academic extension to the city, the economics, the politics, the corruption and crime and bustling throng of diverse species, there the mad science that's indistinguishable from magic and here's danger, madness and death - often hideous and bloody - around every corner: basically it's Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar and Jack Vance's Dying Earth and you could probably talk knowingly about George RR Martin for kids if you really wanted to.

Some really quite amazingly horrible stuff happens in the course of this adventure. There's is intrigue and betrayal, but there are deaths and murders and mutilations that were either shocking or gratifying in a book for children, I'm not sure which, and it's probably both. The writing makes sure it all goes down easily, however - a tad too easily, perhaps. One is invested in the world and in the story, but never quite the characters. The kind of smooth clarity of the prose that explains complex ideas and gruesome deaths with deceptive simplicity tends to describe characters and their emotions and personalities without ever quite making them really come alive to the reader.

Not that that'll stop me sailing off into the next one. ( )