Cogheart

Peter Bunzl's Cogheart is a Victorian adventure for 8 year olds that opens with an airship being shot out of the sky.

What happens

Lily Hartman is stuck at a finishing school she can't stand. She is supposed to be walking around the hall with books balanced on her head. She is actually reading penny dreadfuls smuggled inside her schoolbook, pencil ready to mark the goriest bits so she can enjoy them again later.

What she wants is the life of an air-pirate. What she gets is Mrs McKracken confiscating the lot. (The girls call her the Kraken. Never to her face, obviously.)

Meanwhile, high above, her father's ship is being chased by a silver one bristling with harpoons. There is only one escape pod and it holds one passenger. John Hartman puts his clockwork fox in it, with a letter for Lily and an instruction to keep its secrets safe.

Then two figures with silver eyes cut their way through the hull.

Lily knows none of this yet. She is too busy being marched to the coal bunker for thumping a classmate who slapped the school's mechanical maid.

That fight tells you everything about her. Molly the maid is treated as a thing by the other girls. Mechs aren't alive, they say, so it doesn't count. Lily thinks that is rubbish and says so very loudly, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets a girl locked in a coal bunker.

Reading it is properly tense. The story cuts between Lily at school and the fox running through a dark forest with a searchlight hunting him and his winding key running down. You spend the whole time knowing something she doesn't.

The world is the other pleasure. Clockwork animals that need winding. Airships with names. Silver eyes glinting in the shadows.

This one doesn't ease you in, which is worth a mention. An airship is attacked, Lily's father is struck down in the first few pages, and everything goes black on him. Not long after, Lily is shut in a pitch-dark bunker and finds a dismembered arm poking out of the coal. Her mother is already dead before the story starts. So if you've got a child who worries about parents vanishing, read the opening chapter alongside them and see how they take it. Plenty of readers will find that exact darkness is the reason they can't put it down.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Moonlocket carries on from here with Lily, Malkin and her friend Robert, and it opens with a jailbreak.