Vox

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Vox is a dark, stormy Edge Chronicles fantasy for 11 year olds about a young librarian knight who crashes into the most dangerous corner of Undertown.

What happens

Rook Barkwater is out on dawn patrol in his little sky craft, the Stormhornet, when he spots hundreds of shrykes lined up for war. He's racing back to report it when something blazing roars up behind him and knocks him out of the sky.

He wakes up in Screetown. It's a wasteland of rubble under a crumbling floating rock, and things live in the cracks. Some of them howl. One of them, a rubble ghoul, would like to drink him dry.

Back in the city the air gets hotter and heavier every day. A goblin general is squeezing a prisoner for secrets. Everyone seems to be plotting something, and an awful lot of it leads back to the enormous Vox Verlix in his Palace of Statues.

Rook is so easy to cheer for. He grew up in the sewers under the city, so being up in the open sky is everything to him. Losing the Stormhornet, a craft he carved and named himself, is properly sad (he says goodbye to it like a friend).

And then a hand reaches down to pull him out of trouble. It belongs to someone he'd given up for dead!

The world is the real star. Ratbirds, rotsuckers, muglumps. Half the fun is just the names, and it all feels grimy, hot and dangerous.

This is a properly dark book, and a parent should know that going in. In the first chapter two young librarian prisoners are dropped into a canyon, and you hear the creatures there kill them. A goblin general tortures a prisoner with poison on a pin, and his soldiers laugh about hanging a factory owner.

A child who's upset by cruelty or by monsters that eat people will probably find it too much. If you've got an older reader who loves real danger and a world with teeth, it's hard to beat.

It's worth knowing this isn't where Rook's story starts. An earlier book comes first, so a few names arrive with history attached. There's enough here to follow along, though.

What to read next

If they want more of this strange world, Beyond the Deepwoods takes them deep into the forest instead. Twig is raised by woodtrolls, dreams of the sky pirates, and comes face to face with a hover worm (the very creature Rook's lucky potion is meant for).