A Web of Air

Philip Reeve's A Web of Air is a big, clever adventure for 11 year olds about a girl who builds the lights for a travelling theatre and stumbles on someone's secret plan to fly.

What happens

Fever Crumb is sixteen and an Engineer through and through. She thinks plays are silly nonsense. She doesn't believe in gods or luck. She's also fairly new to smiling (and still not very good at it).

So it's a bit funny that she's spent two years rolling round Europa on a theatre on wheels, wiring up its stage lamps. Ten-year-old Ruan and his little sister Fern travel with her. Ruan thinks there's nobody in the world as lovely as Fever, and the first chapter is his mad dash for a scrap of copper wire before the curtain goes up.

Then the theatre reaches Mayda-at-the-World's-End. It's a city built inside a giant crater, where whole houses glide up and down the cliffs every morning. Fever goes for a walk one night and a little paper glider swoops out of the dark and lands at her feet. It's beautifully made. And it's the shape of something that could carry a person.

Someone in Mayda is working on flight. Someone is also watching her from the terraces above. And the next morning a bald, smiling stranger is calling her name from the harbour, saying he's an Engineer from London too.

There's so much going on in this world! Begging seabirds with little bony fingers on their wings. An actor in rhinestone armour playing Mad King Elvis of America. A crowd gasping at electric light because they've never seen it before. It's very funny watching Fever's sensible brain bump into all of it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The prologue is sad. A boy called Arlo is up on a hilltop when a giant wave hits his island. His home and his whole family are swept away and he's left alone with the birds. It happens fast and it isn't graphic, but it's a heavy start. Your reader will also feel the tension of a stranger who seems to know far more than he says.

This is the second Fever Crumb book and it carries straight on from the first. The early chapters talk openly about what happened to Fever in London, so it's MUCH better to start with Fever Crumb itself. A reader who already loves her will be thrilled to see what she does next.

What to read next

If it's the thought of a whole city on wheels that grabs them, Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines shows London rolling along on giant caterpillar tracks, seven tiers high, chasing a little mining town across a dried-up sea.