Read Scrivener’s Moon free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Philip Reeve's Scrivener's Moon is a sweeping adventure for 11 year olds about a girl who comes home to find her whole city being turned into a machine.
Fever Crumb has been away for two years. When her land-barge rolls back into London, half of it has gone. Whole streets have been knocked down. In their place a vast new London is rising on caterpillar tracks, tier on tier, bristling with cranes.
A city on wheels! Dr Crumb is thrilled and can't wait to show her round. Fever, an Engineer to her bones, isn't sure it's rational at all. And that's before she finds his new apprentice is Charley Shallow, a boy she's very much not pleased to see.
It isn't only Fever's story. Charley gets chapters of his own, and he's tougher than he looks. Far to the north, a seventeen-year-old called Cluny Morvish keeps dreaming of the new London with jaws, swallowing whole forts. Her people's old technomancer decides the dreams are a warning from the Ancestors. So Cluny is sent to tell everyone, enemies included.
This follows on from Fever's earlier adventures, and the story doesn't stop to explain everything. There's a lot of history to pick up (a city called Mayda, an inventor called Arlo, a first kiss). A reader who's met Fever before will get far more out of it.
It's the ideas that make it. How do you move a city? Who pays for it? What happens to the people whose homes are in the way? It's a brilliant one for a reader who likes to think while they read.
Be aware that this one has real violence in it. Charley smashes a bully's nose with an iron jug and holds a knife to his throat. The prologue opens on someone pulling an arrow out of their own chest. There's war in the north and talk of sacrifice. Some of the grown-up feelings will sail over a younger head. It's one for the oldest readers here.
If it's the machines they love most, Philip Reeve's Larklight has a whole house spinning through space beyond the Moon. Its gravity keeps going wrong and its air comes from deliveries of comet ice.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
