Blog #6

Since I finished the book Brisinger, I just recently started a book titled Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. So far it's about a cabin boy that serves on a luxury passenger airship called the Aurora. The cabin boy's name is Matt Cruse and he seems to be very well liked by the captain, young (around 15 years old), skilled, brave, loves being in the sky, and also his father seems to have had a connection to the Aurora and this seems to be very important to Matt (it's sort of inferred that his father is missing or dead, but this hasn't really been explained yet). In the beginning of the book Matt is on lookout duty and spots a lone hot air balloon in the night, the balloon doesn't respond with their efforts to communicate with it so they try and pull it aboard. Through some terrific and daring feats by Matt they pull it in along with a dying balloonist. Later the dying balloonist tells Matt of beautiful creatures in the sky right before he dies. Then the story skips ahead to a year later and the dead balloonist seems to be completely forgotten by Matt, but I can't help but think that the first scene really sets up the rest of the book. Why else would it be in there. So a year later the Aurora is setting off on another 5 day voyage and we are introduced to 2 passengers in particular, Kate de Vries (another 15 year old) and Miss Simpkins (her chaperon). Kate is very curious, mischievous, and polite. However Miss Simpkins seems to like nothing, is very rude, and seems to not want to be on the airship cruise. I predict that in the next couple chapters Matt and Kate become pretty good friends because they are the same age and that's usually how stories go, otherwise the author wouldn't have taken such special time to introduce Kate.
I'd also like to mention that I really liked one of the paragraphs on the very first page of the book where Matt describes the sky as being full of heroes and adventures (the constellations and their stories) fighting against each other to make themselves known. I've never really thought about the stars that way before and I think that's a really unique way of looking at them and obviously Matt must spend a lot of time gazing at them.
I really like the word choice in this book too and the plot seems to be very interesting so far and I can't wait to continue reading!