This is the first book in Philip Reeve’s award-winning sci-fi quartet, Mortal Engines, in which entire cities are motorised on wheels and frequently fight each other for survival.
Set in a distant, dystopian future, the predatory traction city of London is a terrible place, with the richest living in luxury on the top tiers and the poorest living in squalor far down below. But there is another, more hopeful city in Reeve’s book. Batmunkh Gompa is beautiful, carved from rock with tiers of terraces and balconies, sparkling lakes, lush gardens, and brightly coloured taxi balloons. With its slogan ‘we shall make the world green again’, this is the utopian dream – and definitely the one readers would prefer to live in.
This gripping, post-apocalyptic thriller will have young sci-fi lovers in Year 7 and above on the edge of their seats.
I have a passion for books set in eighteenth and nineteenth-century London – tales brimming with dark courts, fog-bound alleyways and n’er do wells lurking in the shadows. There are echoes of Oliver Twist in this story about Smith, a ragamuffin pickpocket, who, when he steals a mysterious ‘dockiment’ from an elderly man, gets caught up in a murderous plot that puts both his, and his sisters’ lives in terrible danger. Garfield was a master storyteller and his books may – as was the case with me – prove to be the perfect stepping stone to Dickens.
I love Emil, who sets off full of innocence and good cheer to visit his grandma in Berlin, when – uh oh – a sinister man in a black bowler hat steals all his money while he is sleeping on the train. What follows is a glorious caper across the city, as Emil and all the children of Berlin team up to use wit and cunning to pursue and capture the thief. Kastner published Emil and the Detectives in 1929, and it is thought to be the first children’s book to positively portray the city as a place of excitement and adventure. It also has my favourite villain, Herr Grundeis in it. Wonderful!
Don’t expect to encounter the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe within the pages of this book. Paul Berna’s classic is set in the back streets of Paris, on the periphery of the city, where a band of scruffy children get entangled in the theft of a hundred million francs from the Paris-Ventimiglia Express. This is a lovely adventure, packed with likeable characters, twists, turns and a satisfying comeuppance for the villains.
Ten year old Claudia is funny, smart and sophisticated, and when she decides to run away, it is not to the boring old countryside, but to the razzle dazzle of New York City. Here, she and her brother Jamie camp out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pound the city streets, use the typewriter outside the Olivetti store on Fifth Avenue, eat lunch at the Automat, and visit New York Public Library to solve a mystery surrounding one of the museum’s exhibits. There is something special about New York that has inspired many children’s writers to capture the spirit of the city in their books. I love them all, but because of Claudia, this is the one I love most.
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Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Would you recommend the book for use in primary schools?
yes
Curriculum links (if relevant)
Curriculum links (if relevant)
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Any other comments