Brightstorm: 1 (The Brightstorm Chronicles)

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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. 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 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? 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.

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. Discover an explorer of a different kind in this beautiful and captivating wordless picture book. A lonely girl draws a magic door on her bedroom wall and escapes through it, then uses her red marker to create things to help her on her way, such as a balloon and a flying carpet. A great reminder that we are all explorers of our own imaginations. 7. Survivors byDavid Long, illustrated by Kerry Hyndman The author is an alumni member of The Golden Egg Academy, and her books are published in the United Kingdom by Scholastic.

3. The Polar Bear Explorers' Club by Alex Bell, illustrated by Tomislav Tomic 

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 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

Author Vashti Hardy knows a thing or two about what makes a thrilling adventure for children - that's what makes her book Brightstormsuch a rip-roaring read! 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. This book is the best book I’ve ever read and I definitely recommend it! I think anyone 9+ would enjoy this book very much! It is so good! I will definitely be reading the sequel too as this is my new favourite book! MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful, honour an recognition in case of success.’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.

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. 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. 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. CROWFALL falls squarely into the cli-fi sub-genre, probably sci-fi leaning rather than fantasy (though, like all Vashti Hardy's books, it's in that science-fantast blurred spot between them.) Orin discovers his leaders are exploiting the island they live on, and have damaged it so badly that it's about to fail. Rather than trying to solve the problem (because that means giving up their benefits), they're going to abandon ship. A pretty easy to understand allegory for our world!

The female characters are intelligent and very strong, and even though Arthur is physically impaired with only one arm, he still pursues his mission. The secondary characters are phenomenal and exciting and added flavor to the story. The technology, machines, characters, inventions, magic, and wolves make the book a fascinating read. 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! 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. 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.

He goes through many difficulties as he grieves his father and his emotional narrative plays a significant role in the story while he grows as a character. Vashti’s world-building poses questions about our own world. Can we invent power sources that do not harm the environment? Are the animals around us more intelligent than we think? Vashti Hardy’s narrative is narrated with confidence that allows her imaginative ideas to soar high. It’s a fascinating and compelling adventure with lively landscapes and fantastic characters of the author’s vividly imagined world. The characters are incredible, with Arthur being sensitive and intuitive while Maudie is clever and has a diversified mind. Harriet, on the other hand, is an unflappable explorer. Arthur and Maudie are are children of a popular explorer, Brightstorm. Their father had gone on an journey to the South Polaris when his ship crashed, killing him and the crew. 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.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. 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. 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.