Horizon

Scott Westerfeld's Horizon is a survival story for 10 year olds about eight children who walk away from a plane crash in the Arctic and into a jungle that shouldn't be there.

What happens

Javi is scared of flying. His friend Molly knows it, so she fires aeroplane trivia at him before take-off (her idea of being kind). They're Team Killbot, four robotics club kids from Brooklyn, off to Tokyo for the Robot Soccer World Championships.

A few rows in front is Yoshi, who'd be happy never to land. In the hold is the four-hundred-year-old family sword he took from his father without asking.

Somewhere over the ice the plane is torn open. When it stops moving, the sky above the broken roof is full of leaves.

It's warm. The birds sound wrong and the compasses just spin. Out of five hundred passengers there are eight left, and not one of them is a grown-up.

The best of it is how the Killbots think. They're engineers, so they count the water bottles (eighty-one) and argue about whether a signal fire would blow up the fuel in the wing.

Then they find a metal ring covered in symbols. Anna gives it a twist while Javi is bouncing on the escape slide, and he floats up towards the treetops as if gravity's been turned down. Who wouldn't jump again for a better look?

The early chapters take turns between the children, so you get Javi's nerves, Molly's bossiness and Yoshi's sulking from the inside.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The crash is frightening. A strange lightning moves through the cabin and people are pulled out through the roof, one of them screaming, while the children watch. Their teacher's seat is simply gone. There are no bodies afterwards, but the youngest boy sobs for his teacher. And the danger doesn't end with the crash. This isn't a series that keeps every child safe.

So it's not one for a nervous flyer, or for a child who needs to know everybody will be fine. If your reader likes to be gripped and to puzzle things out alongside the characters, it's a cracking start.

And it is only a start. This is the first book of one long story, and the books need reading in order. Deadzone, by Jennifer A. Nielsen, comes next.

What to read next

If the crashing and surviving is the part that grabs them, The Explorer is in the library too. Katherine Rundell drops four children into the Amazon when their little plane comes down in the dark. No strange lights this time, just a snake, a lot of rain and a girl called Con who's certain they're all going to die.