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Philip Reeve's Larklight is a rip-roaring adventure for 11 year olds, set in a world where Britain has been sailing between the planets for over a century.
Art Mumby lives at Larklight, a creaky old house spinning along its own lonely orbit past the Moon. The gravity keeps failing. The servants are clanking, smoking machines. His sister Myrtle has been practising the same piano piece for months, and she calls him a little beast.
Nothing ever happens there. Then a letter arrives saying a Mr Webster would like to visit.
Mr Webster turns out to be an enormous white spider in a shabby bowler hat. And he's brought friends!
From there it doesn't let up. Art and Myrtle escape in a lifeboat, crash-land on the Moon and stumble onto a plain covered in broken jars (and what's inside them is not nice at all).
The best bit is Art's voice. He's plucky and polite and terribly British about everything, even while being chased by giant spiders. Myrtle is the perfect snooty big sister. She won't take off her brown serge dress in a boiling-hot lifeboat because it wouldn't be proper. Their squabbling is so funny.
There's lots of daft detail to enjoy too. Hoverhogs snuffle up the floating crumbs, the Queen and Prince Albert are planning a Great Exhibition, and Myrtle looks down on anyone who isn't English (the joke is on her).
It gets properly scary. Art believes the spiders have eaten his father, and you don't find out in the early chapters whether he's right. Their mother died years before the story starts. On the Moon there are skeletons in the jars, and one still has bits of flesh on it. Then Art is sealed inside a jar with a hungry grub.
For a reader who hates creepy-crawlies, the spiders could be too much. If they love an old-fashioned adventure with plenty of jokes and a few proper frights, they'll be hooked.
If Philip Reeve's odd machines are a hit, Fever Crumb opens with a girl and her guardian building paper boys, wire skeletons and all, in a very strange London.
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