Shadowsea

Shadowsea, by Peter Bunzl, is a Victorian adventure for 9 year olds with airships, clockwork animals and a very nasty experiment on the seabed.

What happens

It opens underwater, in a half-built base clamped to the edge of a trench. A thirteen year old boy called Dane is making a wagon out of jam jar lids and flattened cans, and harnessing a white mouse to pull it.

His aunt takes the mouse off him. She is a professor and she does not approve of naming things, because once you name a thing you start to care about it. Then she kills the mouse in front of him, walks through a lead-lined door and switches on a machine designed to bring it back.

It works. The mouse gets up. Then the lightning finds Dane, who is watching through the door, and after that it finds everybody else on the base.

That is the first ten minutes, and it is a shock even if you know the series.

The book then cuts to Christmas morning on an airship over the Atlantic, which is where it stays for a good while, and the change of gear is lovely. Lily wakes up in a top bunk. Her father is snoring in the middle one. Her best friend Robert is below him, and Malkin, her clockwork fox, is switched off beside the pillow waiting for someone to wind him.

They open stockings with an orange and three walnuts in. Her papa gives her a magnifying glass, because she would like to be Sherlock Holmes.

If your reader likes the nuts and bolts of a made-up world, this is a feast. The airship has a writing room, two mechanical waiters and a viewing platform reached by a spiral staircase up through the middle of the balloon. Malkin has a winding key on a string round his neck and an opinion about everything.

The thing to watch here is the tone swing. The cosy parts are very cosy and the dark parts are properly dark. A child is killed on the second page. A crew dies in a corridor. A pet mouse is killed by a grown-up in a lab coat who feels nothing about it. If your reader is fine with peril but not with cruelty to animals, that one scene is the one to look at first.

Also, it is not the first of these. Lily already has her mechanical heart, Robert is already her partner in crime, and how any of that came about is treated as old news.

What to read next

So if they want it from the beginning, Cogheart is where that story starts. Lily is at a dreadful boarding school reading penny dreadfuls in deportment class, and a letter from her father is on its way to her in a fox's collar.