About this item
In the year and a half since the flight of the first manned balloon in 1783, an Italian has flown, a Scot has flown, a woman has flown, even a sheep has flown. But no one has flown from one country to another. John Jeffries, an Englishman, and his pilot, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, want to be the first. On January 7, 1785, they set out to cross the English Channel to France in a balloon. All seemed to be going fine, until Jeffries decides the balloon looks too fat and adjusts the air valve -- how hard could it be? Too bad he drops the wrench over the side of the aerial car. With no way to adjust the valve, the balloon begins to sink. Jeffries and Blanchard throw as much as they can overboard -- until there is nothing left, not even their clothes. Luckily, they come up with a clever (and surprising) solution that saves the day. A VOYAGE IN THE CLOUDS from Matthew Olshan and Sophie Blackall is a journey that will keep kids laughing the whole way.A Margaret Ferguson Book
About the Author
I tend to think about stories in terms of the energy they release.
Some stories are a long slow burn of pathos; others flash before your eyes in a burst of delirium or delight. Still others seem to detonate inside of you, clearing the way for a new understanding.
A few exceedingly rare stories somehow manage to catalyze all of these reactions. Those are the most mysterious of all.
As a reader, I'm interested in all of these strange forms of combustion. A brilliant kids' book is just as dazzling to me as a heartbreaking literary novel. I can't imagine being fascinated by fireworks but somehow ignoring the subtle pleasure of the Northern Lights.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of specialization. The publishing world depends, like any business, on market segmentation and branding. It says: "You are a writer of children's books;" or "You are a writer of serious books for grown-ups." This poses a challenge to the writer who wants to experiment with stories in all their infinite diversity.
I'm a curious fellow. I like to learn how to do new things. This has led me to study languages living and dead; fly airplanes; sing Renaissance polyphony; restore antique machines; cook as if I were a citizen of every continent; renovate houses; croak like a Tuvan throat singer; soup-up computers; build a mud oven.
Through it all, there has always been writing. Novels, screenplays, children's books, op-eds, letters, poems. Writing, like marriage, involves doing the same thing every day, but with fresh eyes and a willing heart.
In other words, it is a discipline: sometimes glorious, often maddening, but always new.
