Mortal Engines

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines is a huge, thrilling adventure for 11 year olds about a world where whole cities hunt each other.

What happens

London is on the move. It's seven tiers high, it rolls on giant caterpillar tracks, and it's chasing a little mining town across the dried-up bed of the North Sea. When it catches up, it eats it.

Everyone on board cheers. So does Tom Natsworthy, a fifteen-year-old Third Class Apprentice in the Guild of Historians. He'd much rather watch than dust the museum's model whales (his usual job).

Tom has no family and no friends to speak of. He spends his days daydreaming about rescuing people and being a hero. Then he meets the hero he's always looked up to, the explorer Thaddeus Valentine, and Valentine's daughter Katherine (with her huge white wolf, who is called Dog).

Down in the Gut, where the city takes its catches apart, a scarred girl pulls a knife on Valentine. Tom stops her and chases her to the edge of a waste chute.

Her name is Hester Shaw. She tells Tom to ask Valentine what he did to her. A few pages later Tom is lying in the mud outside London, watching his city roll away without him.

What a start! It moves so fast. And it's so good at showing Tom his world isn't what he thought it was. He feels sorry for the people of the little town even while he's cheering. After that, it's very hard to go back to believing everything the grown-ups told him.

Hester is brilliant. She's furious, rude and very funny in a dry way. When Tom complains she's torn up one of his best shirts for a bandage, she points out it's one of her best legs. Meanwhile, back in London, Katherine starts noticing that her dad is hiding something.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It's properly violent for this shelf. Hester tries to stab a man in front of Tom, a crossbow bolt goes through her leg, and she jumps down the chute expecting to die. Her face is described in detail (one eye, a smashed nose). She says her parents were murdered, and a bully jokes about how Tom's parents died. Tom also gets kneed between the legs in a fight.

For a reader who's ready for all that, it's one of the most exciting openings out there.

What to read next

If they'd like to see a very different London, Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb is about a girl raised by the city's Engineers in a place still full of streets, sedan chairs and wind trams.