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Philip Reeve's Starcross is a gloriously old-fashioned space adventure for 11 year olds, set in a seaside hotel on an asteroid where the tide has been out for a hundred million years.
Art Mumby is almost twelve and wants to be an explorer (not to do Long Division). His house, Larklight, floats in orbit north of the Moon, and right now it's full of builders. So when an invitation arrives to a new hotel at Starcross, promising sea bathing, he's all agog. There's no sea in the asteroid belt, as Art points out.
Off they go on the space railway, which runs over bridges more than a thousand miles long. The hotel is all gold and marble and clockwork waiters. The owner, a whiskery Mr Titfer, insists the sea is simply out. And the next morning, it's back.
It doesn't start gently, though. The very first pages have two secret agents chased along a dry beach by Punch and Judy booths that won't stop coming, then turned into trees. It's creepy rather than gory, and it tells you straight away that something is very wrong at Starcross.
The real joy is Art's voice. He tells it like a proper old-fashioned adventure hero, with chapter titles like "In Which We Deplore the Din of Decorators". His running battle with his big sister is very funny. Myrtle is pining for the space pirate Jack Havock, who hasn't answered a single one of her letters (Art suspects he's had a narrow escape).
The other guests are a treat too. There's a deaf singer called the Cockney Nightingale and a talking plant known as Professor Ferny, the Educated Shrub.
It's a rich, wordy read, full of aether-ships and Martians, so it suits a confident reader who loves language. The old-fashioned voice also comes with some old-fashioned attitudes. Myrtle is a terrible snob, and one guest guesses a "dusky" young man must be a rajah. The joke is on the characters, but it might be worth a chat.
It follows on from Larklight, and Art mentions their earlier adventures as he goes.
If they fall for Art and Myrtle, Mothstorm takes the whole crew back to Larklight for a Christmas where the pudding has gone badly wrong.
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