Starclimber
By Kenneth Oppel
Faber £6.99

Seventeen year old Matt Cruse is spending his summer in Paris, working as an airship captain. It sounds exciting, but in reality he has a very smallcrew and all they are doing is ferrying chunks of prefabricated metal up to a large construction reaching high into the sky, a sort of new Tower of Babel. Indeed there ar emany who think that is an affront to God and and Matt has to thwart a terrorist attack from close to home so that he can save the day and meet his date the beautiful, but scheming Kete Devries.

All this in the opening few pages. The pair are soon recruited into a secret Canadian space project. They of course accept, but Matt finds that not only is he just one of over a hundred recruits of which only a handful will be chosen, but also that Kate's very rich family do not approve of her scientific studies and are planning to marry her off.
Even when luck brings the two teenagers together on the trip, along with the ship's designer, an eccentric photographer, a pompous scientist and a small crew, they find that there is plenty of danger in the skies above us.
I had not read any of Oppel's previous work, and although this is a sequel to Skybreaker, you don't need to have read the previous novel to enjoy the action (with a sprinkling of romance), and action there is plenty of.

Think of something that will go wrong and it will. This might be due to the novel form of transportation -  a slow climb up a steel rope suspended out in space. An intruiging idea, but not one that aska for many
piloting skills. Perils faced include some strange denizens of the upper skies as well as rapture of the deep and even a bad case of migraine.
This zips through at a fair lick and although told from Matt's point of view, it does develop characters well.
It also gives an alternative view of late Victorian/early Edwardian society, with no planes and not mention of the British empire or the U.S.

It is more of a romp with a different slant on Jules Verne and a very enjoyable one too.