Jack Cloudie (Jackelian World, #5)

by Stephen Hunt

A tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style world as the acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Secrets of the Fire Sea. Thanks to his father's gambling debts, young Jack Keats finds himself on the streets and trying to survive as a pickpocket, desperate to graft enough coins to keep him and his two younger brothers fed. Following a daring bank robbery gone badly awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold, only to be pressed into Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the far-away deserts of Cassarabia. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Omar ibn Barir, the slave of a rich merchant lord finds his life turned upside down when his master's religious sect is banned. Unexpectedly freed, he survives the destruction of his home to enter into the service of the Caliph's military forces - just as war is brewing. Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across a senseless field of war. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack's true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph's court?
A cult that hides the deadly secret to the origins of the gas being used to float Cassarabia's new aerial navy. If Jack and his shipmates can discover what Cassarabia's aggressive new regime is trying to conceal, he might survive the most horrific of wars and clear his family's name. If not...

• ISBN10: 0007289707
• ISBN13: 9780007289707
• Publish Date: 7 July 2011
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 24 August 2012
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperVoyager
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 560
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

I've loved this series so far, but this installment just draaaaagged out forever with very little to interest me. The characters were dull, the plot was boring, and I very nearly decided to not finish the final 120 pages. I ended up persevering, and the final 120 pages were the most interesting out of the whole book, but all the twists and shocks and deaths they contained still had absolutely no effect on me at all.