#Airborn audio book free free#

Oppel gives both Matt and Kate serious difficulties as they struggle individually and together, against circumstances and against each other. Aren’t they lovely?)Īirborn is followed by Skybreaker and Starclimber, as Matt and Kate rise to greater heights, both literally as they go higher in the sky, culminating in an adventure in space, and metaphorically as they grow up and determine their own characters and their relationship with each other and with the wider community. This, of course, means ignoring her wealthy parents’ intentions of raising (via chaperone) a respectable, proper daughter, and keeping them (and the chaperone, whenever possible) ignorant of her activities. Kate is determined to prove that he was right, and to earn for him and for herself respected places in the scientific community. Kate’s grandfather claimed he saw such animals, but his claims were dismissed as the ravings of a dying man.

Kate is absolutely committed to science, specifically, to aerozoology, the study of animals that live in the air. Kate de Vries, Matt’s almost co-protagonist, has equally ambitious plans.

#Airborn audio book free free#

He will be able to stay aloft forever, where he feels close to his dad and free from the confines of poverty and air-less cities. Someday, Matt dreams, he will be captain of his own ship. Matt’s plan is to work his way up the ranks and somehow earn enough money to support his widowed mother and younger sisters, and allow him to attend the new prestigious Airship Academy. Matt Cruse, the protagonist, is fortunate enough to work as a cabin boy aboard the massive luxury airship Aurora, captained by Samuel Walken. The social setting is reminiscent of the early decades of the 1900s. Airships are something like blimps: they rely on gas contained within huge sacs to keep themselves afloat in the world of Airborn, airplanes have not been invented. In the world of Ken Oppel’s Airborn, a gas called hydrium makes airships a main means of transportation.