Mothstorm

Philip Reeve's Mothstorm is a Victorian space adventure for 11 year olds, narrated by a boy whose house floats in orbit somewhere beyond the Moon.

What happens

It's Christmas at Larklight. Art and his sister Myrtle are out on the front porch in fleece-lined winter-weight spacesuits, decorating the tree and calling each other names. Dunderhead. Clodpole. Ninnyhammer. Booby.

The gravity out there is patchy, so the baubles keep working loose and drifting off into the dark.

Then a ship docks with presents and hams and game pies aboard, Myrtle stops shouting and starts pinching colour into her cheeks, and Father opens the front door to announce that the Pudding has gone Rogue.

That's the joke of the whole book. Everything is enormously British and enormously Victorian, all of it is happening in space, and nobody involved finds that the least bit peculiar. A Pudding Worm has got into the Christmas pud. Its antennae look like a sprig of holly and its eyes glint like silver sixpences.

Mother goes after it with the flame-gun Father once bought for burning moss off the gutters. Art grabs the brandy decanter on his way past, because he knows perfectly well what brandy is for.

Myrtle faints. Art can't work out whether it's the emergency or the fact that Father has just said the word spawn in mixed company.

Art narrates the whole thing himself, in a chatty old-fashioned voice, with footnotes. He's terribly anxious you shouldn't think badly of him, and he'll mention in passing that the entire business was really his sister's fault.

Then a warship comes alongside, and the auto-butler asks whether he should tell the captain they're not at home.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The sentences are long, the words are Victorian and half the fun is in things like ninnyhammer and aethernaut. A confident reader will have a wonderful time with it. A reader still working hard at the decoding will find it heavy, so this might be one to read aloud together for the first chapter or two.

It also sits some way into a series. Art keeps looking back at earlier adventures with the same crew. None of that stops you following this one, but the teasing about who kissed whom lands better if you've met everybody already.

What to read next

Starcross is in the library if your reader would rather begin earlier. It's the adventure Art keeps referring back to, and it opens with two secret service agents sprinting along a seaside promenade with an automated Punch and Judy booth rolling after them.