Brightstorm: 1 (The Brightstorm Chronicles)

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With inventive touches to the story such as pygmy dinosaurs and frost fairies, the story landscape is easy to imagine and get lost in. It's punctuated with some stunning illustrations by Tomic which add beautifully to the atmosphere. 4. Tom Crean's Rabbit: A True Story from Scott's Last Voyage byMeredith Hooper,‎ illustrated by Bert Kitchen The two end up answering an advertisement to assist a crew in new exploration, hoping to discover the truth. They escape slavery, join a ragtag crew of a Skyship captained by Harriet Culpepper, and start a journey to South Polaris to retrieve their father’s reputation and investigate what happened to their father during the expedition. They are devastated by the news and confused, and they don’t know what to believe. After investigation, the Lontown Geographical Society has found Ernest Brightstorm guilty of destroying the expedition of Eudora Vane, his competitor. A mysterious clue makes the twins question the story they’ve just been told. To discover the truth, they’ve to go on a lifetime journey. Tropes. Orphan twins are very tropey. Due to societal norms, most of the time the boy is the intellectual, engineer one and the girl is the more dreamy, book nerd. This one flips that around, which I like. I would have liked to see more of that in the story with the plot. Takeaways

Maudie and Arthur were not only orphaned and sold to a cruel family, their father and their name was disgraced. The twins know their father didn’t do what he was accused of doing and they are determined to become explorers like their father and clear his name. Vashti Hardy is an award-winning United Kingdom writer of children’s books. She taught in primary school for some time and has much interest in children’s stories. She holds a first-class honor teaching degree in English and an MA in creative writing from the University of Chichester.Amelia Earhart was an inspiration for the character Harriet Culpepper in Brightstorm, and this book makes Earhart's story accessible to the young reader. The tale of this intrepid aviator is simply told alongside vivid illustration, and travels from her childhood dreams to her achievements and eventual disappearance. The author is an alumni member of The Golden Egg Academy, and her books are published in the United Kingdom by Scholastic.

Vashti loves adventures and invention and has always been excited by real-life explorers from history. With the use of journals, Vashti creates fantasy worlds during her free time. After quitting teaching, she became a copywriter and digital marketing executive. I love the environmentalist theme of the story. I normally don’t really love political statements, but the environmental issue is near and dear to my heart. (I have a hippie mom to thank for that.) I love nature and I want my great grandchildren to enjoy it as much as I do. Anyhow, Maud and Arthur are on a ship powered by water instead of pitch. This gives them an advantage in the race south because water is a readily available resource, unlike pitch. They also visit a city that has converted to hydro and wind power instead of pitch and has experienced great success. Hmmm. A parallel to any current issue? I think so! What can we Learn from Hardy?With bold and bright illustrations, this book is a great way to find out about some unsung heroes and to celebrate the achievements of women around the world. 3. The Polar Bear Explorers' Club byAlex Bell, illustrated by Tomislav Tomic It was equally exciting and sad. Arthur and Maudie have been my trusted companions and have grown into young adults by the end of Firesong, but I’ve loved delving into another aspect of the world. One of the thrilling thing about creating a fantasy world is that there are any number of possible stories to be told in any number of locations and points in time.

Twelve-year-old twins Maudie and Arthur’s world comes crashing in when their explorer dad is reported dead in his mission to get to South Polaris. Not only that, their family name is tainted when he is accused of stealing another skyship’s fuel before he died, which means they are unable to inherit their family home. Stella Starflake Pearl is a great young protagonist who becomes the first female to be allowed into the Polar Bear Explorers' Club. On an expedition to the Icelands, Stella and three fellow junior explorers get separated from the main expedition. There is an emerging genre (sub-genre?) of fiction called climate fiction (cli-fi.) It's often speculative, ranging from dystopia leaning to science fiction or fantasy leaning. Regardless of where it falls in the other genres, cli-fi books always focus on environmental damage and human's involvement in it - usually them trying to save it as well as how they've destroyed it. Space explorers, whether on the ground as scientists or the astronauts themselves, are a hive of amazing inspirational stories.This book tells the stories of 50 women who have contributed to space exploration from the past to modern day. Brightstorm gives a series of unfortunate events around the world in 80 days and provides the story with a steampunk twist. The book has quirky characters, skyships, and discerning animals to give an epic and fantastic action-adventure tale.Maud is a brilliant engineer. Arthur loves to read and learn and discover. Of course, the children still hold hope that perhaps their father survived the expedition south. So when they get the opportunity to go on an expedition south, they jump at the chance to fulfill a life long dream and maybe even find their father, or at the very least, find out the truth of what happened on that trip. How was the Story? Lontown for London (I don’t know if this is what was meant, but I couldn’t unmake this connection in my mind.) In addition to his death, he is blamed for having stolen fuel from another airship before his death and is accused of violating explorers’ laws, which led to losing everything under his name. Arthur and Maudie have nothing left and are sold and listed for servitude by a slave family. If you have a young reader interested in adventure, books about animals, and airships, this is a perfect book for them. This amazing book by Vashti Hardy keeps the reader engaged and hooked as you go on an epic adventure. Thus began my reading of Brightstorm. Perhaps that is why I was not thrilled with the beginning of this book. I didn’t get swept up in the steampunk craze that began a number of years ago. I admire the creativity in all the costumes and the art, but not many of the stories enticed me to read them. But the cover on this one…Did you see the cover on this book?? It is simply beautiful!

I've included this as my last choice because it so perfectly shows how being an 'explorer' is as much about the simple joy found in discovering the everyday outside your doorstep as it is the great feats of exploring the wider world. This book is based on the diaries of those who sailed to the South Pole on board The Terra Nova with Captain Scott in 1910. In the story, a member of the crew, Tom Crean, searches for somewhere on the ship where his pet rabbit can make her nest and have her babies. The twins Arthur and Maudie Brightstorm receive the news that their father has just passed on while attempting to reach the southernmost corner of the world. With their only parent passing away, they have left orphans and come out of their comfortable life.Another thing I like about this story is a character called Felicity. She has enormous feet. Her feet can predict things. It is quite silly and quite fun. He writes a number of very likable characters. It drew me in instantly as a fabulous call to adventure and I began to consider what sort of person would reply to such an advert. What if two children, a boy and a girl, replied? They would need an extremely compelling reason. Then Arthur and Maudie Brightstorm arrived in my imagination and I started building their story and the situation with their explorer father and the history of their mother. I decided on a fantasy world with similarities to our own, yet with many more places waiting to be discovered, populated by humans and creatures just as intelligent called sapients. The world of the Wide was born.