Thunder City [Mortal Engines]
by Philip Reeve
Middle School, High School    Scholastic    336 pp.
11/24    9781546138235    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781546138242    $19.99

This prequel to Reeve’s acclaimed postapocalyptic, steampunk Mortal Engines series opens some two hundred years earlier, during the peaceful Golden Age of Traction, as the city of Thorbury is violently boarded and captured by villain Gabriel Strega. History tutor Miss Lavinia Torpenhow determines to make her way to Paris to bring home Max Angmering, son of the just-assassinated mayor, in hopes of restoring order—setting off a multilayered adventure that will encompass a prison break, multiple betrayals, Revenants (old-tech reanimated dead warriors), a plunge into the sea from an aloft “Air B&B” (with the swimming pool as a lifeboat), a submarine rescue, a kidnapping, and more. Along the way Miss Torpenhow is joined by the young Revenant fighter Tamzin Pook, rather hapless Max, over-the-hill mercenary Oddington Doom, bombastic painter Giotto Trubshawe, and still-partly-human Revenant Eve Vespertine to form a ragtag band of companions. Readers will be swept away by the nonstop action and the sheer inventiveness of the plot; intrigued by the companions’ around-the-world exploits; and pulled in by the depth of the characterizations and of the humans’ (plus Eve’s) relationships. In the end, though Strega is vanquished, his plans to make Thorbury a less civilized and more predatory city are adopted, setting up the machinery that will usher in the “brutal new age” of the later Mortal Engine books.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.