The Cloud Catcher's Apprentice
Book One: The Thunder-in-a-Jar Incident

About this book:

When nine-year-old Milo Finch answers a peculiar help-wanted notice—requiring breath-holding skills, knot knowledge, and zero chatter—he never expects to find himself apprenticed to a cloud catcher on a wind-scoured ridge where weather is harvested like hay. Master Barnaby Orpwood runs Cumulus Farm with iron rules and copper-wire nets, bottling mountain mist for silk-dyers, trapping autumn squalls for ironworks, and sealing thunderstorms in heavy green jars that vibrate with captured voltage. It's honest work, if occasionally loud, and Milo discovers he has a knack for reading the sky's shifting moods—until a hairline crack in a storm jar sets a lightning bolt loose in the hayloft, and the quiet business of weather-making erupts into a desperate chase across fog-bound hills and through the whispering wind network.

Brimming with inventive world-building, tactile sensory detail, and a narrator whose voice feels like a classic in the making, *The Cloud Catcher's Apprentice* turns the atmosphere itself into a landscape of wonder and danger. From the clove-hitch precision of net-handling to the alchemy of grading vapor by star-rating, every chapter crackles with the joy of discovering a secret trade hidden in plain sight. Readers who love Diana Wynne Jones's practical magic or Philip Pullman's lyrical invention will find themselves scanning the horizon for funnel-shaped sails, listening for the hum of copper wire on the breeze, and hoping the next storm rolls in soon—because Milo's apprenticeship has only just begun, and the sky is full of weather waiting to be caught.