Larklight by Philip Reeve

This book is essentially Simon R. Green for ten-year-olds. Eleven-year-old Art Mundy and his fifteen-year-old sister, Myrtle, live with their father on Larklight, a Victorian mansion that orbits the moon. Why a Victorian mansion? Because that just happens to be the era they live in. For reasons eventually explained in the book, mankind achieved space travel in the time of Isaac Newton.

When their house is attacked by giant alien spiders, Art and Myrtle escape to the moon, where they’re eventually rescued by Jack Havock, an infamous, half-black fifteen-year-old pirate. Jack is the soul survivor of a colony whose people turned into trees, resulting in his being raised in a lab as they tried to discover why he wasn’t a tree, until he and other aliens being held there escaped and became pirates. Jack agrees to get the siblings safely to a British base, but both hormones and more aliens chasing Art and Myrtle interfere.

Reeve seems to have simply sat down, written down everything he thought was cool when he was a kid, and then paused for a few moments to consider what his sister probably wanted to read about, resulting in things like Martian secret agent knife-wielding spy girls. It is very, very much written for its target audience (10-12-year-old boys) and adopts that attitude about things, especially sisters, but is very fun. The “Oh so Victorian! See how Victorian I am?” prose can be grating at times, but works overall.

I do, though, have quibble.
( spoilers )

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