Skycircus

Peter Bunzl's Skycircus is a Victorian adventure for 9 year olds about a girl with a clockwork heart and a riddle left on her doorstep.

What happens

Lily Hartman turns fourteen and nobody in the house has remembered. Her father has a lifetime achievement award to collect from the Mechanists' Guild that evening, so the party has been pushed to tomorrow, which Lily feels is the same as cancelling it.

So she's sulking on the stairs in her best red dress. It's her favourite because it has pockets, and because it stands out nicely against the gloomy wallpaper, so everyone can see what a martyr she's being.

Then somebody knocks. When she opens the door there's nobody there. Just a striped hatbox with a card tucked under the ribbon, and a rhyme asking what it is that makes her tick.

Which is not a comfortable question, because Lily's heart is made of clockwork, and only four people and a few mechanicals know it.

Inside the box is a small leather notebook that belonged to her mother, who died when Lily was small. It's full of drawings of birds and wing measurements and wind charts and pictures of Icarus. Her mother was trying to work out how to fly. Lily has never seen it before and has no idea who sent it. The card promises a second gift.

The world around all this is great fun. The cook is a mechanical who shouts things like cogs and chronometers at a trout that won't boil. Malkin the mechanical fox gnaws people's trouser legs and tells them they smell of mothballs. Lily and her friend Robert have a den in the tower where she has pinned up penny dreadful illustrations and painted extra blood on them with her watercolour set.

That mix is really the appeal. Clockwork servants, airships and a proper mystery, with a heroine who is cross and funny and dreads the idea of living for ever.

Your reader should know that grief runs underneath it. Lily's mother is dead and Robert's father died the year before, and the whole plot starts with a present from someone who knew her mother. It's handled gently and it isn't gruesome, but a child who is tender about parents may feel it.

What to read next

This one also sits some way into Lily's story. She found out about her heart a year ago, and Robert only came to live at the manor after his father died. If your reader would rather start at the start, the first Cogheart book is in the library, and it opens with her father's airship being harpooned out of the sky.