A Darkling Plain

Philip Reeve's A Darkling Plain is a big, gripping adventure for 11 year olds set in a world where whole cities roll across the land on wheels.

What happens

This one isn't a starting point. It carries straight on from earlier adventures and leans on them. Brighton, Cloud 9 and the day London died all come up as things everybody already knows about.

Six months on, Theo is home in the African mountain city of Zagwa. He's nearly seventeen and still ashamed of what he's been (a bomber pilot, a prisoner and a slave). Then, gliding on a kite high above the city, he spots two enemy airships heading for the peace talks where his whole family is watching. So he lands on one.

Far away, Wren is sitting in a café trying to write to him. It's about her twentieth attempt and every one ends up in the bin. She's very pleased with her new lopsided haircut, though.

Her dad, Tom, has just been told by a heart doctor that he has a few years left. He gives Wren a much cheerier version. Then he spots a woman at an auction house who looks exactly like Clytie Potts, a Historian he knew as a boy in London. She should have died with the city nearly twenty years ago. She says she's never heard of him and flies off two days early.

Who wouldn't want to follow her? Wren certainly does, and she's a lot craftier about it than her dad.

Several stories run side by side and you swap between them. Theo's opening is fast and frightening. Wren's chapters are funny and full of the kind of worrying about a boy that anyone who's had a crush will recognise. Tom's are the quiet, sad ones.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This sits right at the top of the shelf. Theo is stabbed twice in the first chapter and there's a lot of blood. An airship explodes and its pilot is flung out through a hole torn in the gondola. There's kissing and teenage romance talk too, and a dad quietly facing his own death. A younger or more sensitive reader might find all that a lot at once.

For a reader who already loves big adventure stories and doesn't mind them turning dark, it's a proper page-turner.

What to read next

If they'd like to see where this world began, Fever Crumb is set in London long before, when a girl brought up by the city's Engineers spends her mornings making paper boys.