__sol__ 's review for:

Clash of the Sky Galleons by Paul Stewart, Chris Riddell

5.0

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Delightful in its commitment to the nostalgia of the early Edge books. The plot is less the focus than expanding and clarifying the world of the first age. We see things merely alluded to in the Twig books, like the harvesting of the flight rocks, the sky shipyards, and new things like mines on the face of the Edge cliff, and a derelict skyship overtaken by floating organisms reminiscent of something from Nausicaa. I love this idea that there's an entire ecosystem of creatures existing in open sky and beneath the cliff that are mostly never seen during the series proper.



The revenge story isn't bad, but it seemed to be constantly struggling to maintain its presence. I was being bombarded with shiny things to look at, only for the story to try and turn my attention to "Wind Jackal is going crazy". I can at least accept Wind Jackal going mad with hatred for the killer of his family, and thus alienating his only remaining child more easily than Quint's estrangement in the Twig books. We've actually seen brief glimpses of Wind Jackal before, and he seemed like a decent father, so the pathos here is deeper as we see him fall apart. With Quint it was whiplash from the icy tyrant in the original series to, "oh actually he was a kind and noble soul".


There was more nostalgia to be had in the characters, with the origin story of Mother Horsefeather, Cowlquape's hilariously gigantic grandfather, Maris getting to be in the spotlight again, and old crew faces plus dead meat some new ones. Okay, I'm being a bit unfair, not all of the new crewmembers died, but at this point S&R's M.O. is no surprise. They did include what I believe is the first twist of the series,

Spoiler

with the revelation that Thaw was "Turbot Smeal" the entire time. It was no surprise that Thaw was going to be a villain by even the halfway point, but I think what actually ended up happening could be a surprise, especially for a younger reader. I have zero memory of what I thought about it on my first read.

The "clash of the sky galleons" is almost completely disconnected from all that. I can only recall a handful of points in the entire story where the two plots intersect. It develops on its own independently of the protagonists, briefly intrudes on their lives, then ends without their input. I would call that bad plotting, but honestly I don't mind. S&R needed an excuse for one last sky ship battle scene, and I'm here for it.



Heretical as this might sound, my complaint about this book is the pictures. The drawings themselves are fine, but they're laid out quite differently than they used to be. I wasn't counting, but I'd say the majority were bordered pictures, with a lot of vertical half pagers. Bordered pictures just feel more cramped, and the narrow vertical compositions are actually more cramped than the unbordered half page horizontal pictures of the past. The full page chapter opening pictures help alleviate things, but I feel a qualitative difference in how the pictures contribute to the story. This way is probably easier on the typesetters, at least. I honestly have half a mind to flip through the whole series again and count + classify all the pictures, assuming nobody else has.