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Topic: Give Me 5 - Cities

Chapter book

The first book in the award-winning Mortal Engines quartet. In a dangerous future, huge motorized cities hunt, attack and fight each other for survival.

As London pursues a small town, young apprentice Tom is flung out into the wastelands, where a terrifying cyborg begins to hunt him down.

Mortal Engines launched Philip Reeve’s brilliantly-imagined creation, the world of the Traction Era, where mobile cities fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic future.

Mortal Engines won the coveted Gold Smarties Award.

Now a feature film of the same name, starring Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan and Hugo Weaving. Produced by Lord of the Rings director, Peter Jackson.#

Chapter book

London street urchin Smith is 12 years old, and an experienced pick-pocket. One day on Ludgate Hill, he robbed an old gentleman, and one minute later watched him silently murdered by two men, who chased him for the document he had stolen but could not understand.
Smith artfully dodges the two men and winds up in the odd company of a wealthy blind man, who takes Smith into his home and provides him with an education. But this new comfort is lost when Smith himself is suspected of the very murder he witnessed.

Leon Garfield was a British novelist, born in 1921. He is best known for children’s historical novels, though he also wrote for adults. He wrote more than thirty books including Shakespeare’s Stories – retellings of Shakespeare’s plays for children, and he won many awards including the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal. He died in 1996, aged 74.

Chapter book

EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES by Erich Kastner has been in print ever since it was first published in 1928.
Young Emil is robbed on his first real railway journey of money entrusted to him by his hard-working mother for the relatives he is to stay with in Berlin. A gang of boys about his own age come to his aid, and a thrilling adventure full of surprises ensues as they use their wits to devise a wonderfully simple but practical trick to capture the thief.

With every detail clearly drawn – from the tiresome business of getting into best clothes for the journey, down to the final anxiety as to what shall be done with a gloriously unexpected reward – this is a story all young readers will enjoy.

Chapter book

A bunch of scruffy urchin kids in the backstreets of Paris outwit thieves to uncover the whereabouts of millions of francs stolen from the Paris-Ventimiglia express. Gaby is the leader, but it is super-cool Marion with her collection of stray dogs who is the heart of the gang.
It all begins when a local villain offers the children a fortune for their ‘horse’ – a headless rocking horse, given old tricycle wheels that they ‘ride’ down the steep cobbled street, but they don’t want to part with it. Then, a few days later, the horse is stolen, and so begins an adventure that is full of twists and turns, leading to a satisfying conclusion when the villains receive their comeuppance.

Chapter book

New York City girl Claudia, a mere month shy of being a twelve-year-old, has resolved to run away from home with her younger brother, Jamie. She knows that she could never pull off the classic spur-of-the-moment departure without a destination (inevitably involving having to eat outside with the insects, and cupcakes melting in the sun); so she plans everything to perfection, including their destination: the grand, elegant, beautiful, all-encompassing Metropolitan Museum of Art.

However, no sooner have Claudia and Jamie settled into their new home, than they are caught up in the mystery of an angel statue bought by the museum for the bargain price of $225. Is it in fact an as yet undiscovered work by Michelangelo, worth millions? Claudia is determined to find out, and her quest leads her to the remarkable, secretive Mrs. Frankweiler, who sold the statue to the museum – and to some equally remarkable discoveries about herself.

Since its first appearance nearly 50 years ago, The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler has gained a place in the hearts of generations of readers – and has rightly become one of the most celebrated and beloved children’s books of all time.

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