Vashti Hardy

I loved the setting and atmosphere of this book. It truly felt like a complete world, down to the smallest gear. I want to know how Lontown works, I want to see a map of the three continents and read the documents from the explorations.

My only gripe would be that Eudora Vane was an almost standard cartoonesque evil villain.

I attended the British author's online talk back in 2021 and I was surprised to learn that the book had been translated in Georgian. I bought it for my daughter for her 9th birthday. I'm not a big fan of fantasy so I decided to read it and practice reading in Georgian at the same time. I also purchased this Kindle book and read them in parallel.

I soon realized that I had purchased the US edition where a chapter had been removed and a small part added in another chapter. It's also interesting show more that the continents are just called First, Second, and Third in the Georgian edition, while they have names - Vornatania (the First Continent), Nadvaaryan (the Second Continent) and the Ice Continent (the Third Continent) - in the American edition, which talks about how arrogant it is to call them just by the ordinal number:

"The names some explorer families in Lontown use are rather arrogant, putting ourselves first and letting everything else we discover in the Wide fall in behind us."

It's clearly that the American publishers felt the need to edit out some colonialism. It's always interesting to compare different translations. I'm really curious to check how it was in the original British edition.

As for the story itself, I really enjoyed it. I realized I missed middle grade books. I also liked that the world was not very different from ours. There is more science and engineering than magic in this book. Even though it's set in another world, it is more adventure than fantasy story in my opinion. The book also deals with more serious topics as grief and disability. The mission of the author in her own words is promoting women in STEM, so Maudie and Harriet are great engineers! Its full of loveable characters, especially Felicity. She reminded me of our ex-nanny. show less

I received an ARC of Brightstorm and loved the characters. Twins have lost their dad while he was venturing to South Polaris. Maudie and Arthur are struggling to find food after losing Dad, but more importantly struggling with accepting their father is gone. They need to know what happened, but how...Miss Harriet Culpepper offers the twins jobs during the Transcontinental Expedition race to South Polaris. Will they find the answers they desire? What happened to dad? Could he be show more alive?
Excellent middle grade read! show less

Second half of the book became faster paced and mysterious action/adventure with well envisioned fantasy world within a world of ships, extreme climates and strange animals. Some animals are sapient.