Synopsis: Matt Cruse is a cabin boy aboard the airship Aurora. Born in the air, sailing the sky has been his life, and so it stings when his place as junior sailmaker is taken by a booksmart rookie. Then he meets Kate de Vries, a wealthy passenger with a quest. Kate takes Matt into her confidence and an unlikely friendship grows between them, but can Matt be sure that she sees him as a friend, rather than merely a tool to use to reach her own goals? Soon such questions become irrelevant, however, when a vicious pirate attack on the Aurora sends her to an uncharted island that may hold the key to Kate's search, or a secret that will kill them all.

Review: In the nature of declaring an interest, it should be noted that Kenneth Oppel clearly has my number. It is possible to write a book which has both zeppelins and pirates in and which I would still not like, but it would take a lot of doing.

With that in mind, Airborn has a great many other things to recommend it. It is an aerial swashbuckler, a shipwreck adventure and an old-fashioned scientific romance all rolled into one. The precocious narrator is a sympathetic character, brave without being foolish, cautious without being cowardly and unwilling to kill without being portrayed as weak. Kate de Vries has an enthusiasm that is as infectious, and as infuriating, to the reader as it is to the narrator. Oppel avoids the cliché trap of having the plucky heiress always be right to press on regardless of the rules; Matt's sense of duty and caution is shown to be equally virtuous.

 If some of the secondary characters lack definition, this is largely due to the first person narrative. The reader knows what Matt knows and it is implicit, and occasionally explicit, that he knows many of the officers and crew only as a dominant impression. Oppel plays this limitation to advantage: the contradiction between the different sides of the pirate Szpirglas's personality is brought into sharp relief by being viewed with confusion from Matt's perspective.

Airborn is a splendid adventure that lives up to the promise of zeppelins and pirate (and zeppelin pirates) splendidly. In places it is a little bleak and the ruthlessness of the pirates could be upsetting for young readers, even those able to manage the text. For stronger readers of 11+, however, this is a cracking read.