Thunder City

Starred review from September 15, 2024
In a long-awaited new Traction Era tale, a motley band of adventurers sets out to take a city back from a ruthless usurper. Setting his tale between the timelines of the Fever Crumb series and the Mortal Engines Quartet, Reeve sends a band of unlikely underdogs up against fiendishly clever new dictator Gabriel Strega. Strega is bent on turning the formerly peaceful mobile town of Thorbury into a ravening urban predator with the help of a small army of mercenaries, a sinister pair of killers, and a squad of hulking cyborg Revenants. The author parades his appealing ensemble--led by genteel but steely tutor Lavinia Torpenhow, boozy ex-soldier Oddington Doom, and Tamzin Pook, a deceptively unprepossessing young gladiator of tantalizingly obscure origin--through a breakneck series of brushes with disaster in various locales, from blood-soaked arena sands to one of posh floating spa Bad Luftgarten's literal Air B&Bs. He then pitches his cast into climactic hails of snapping bullets, titanic bot vs. bot battles, and fan-pleasing scenes of massive cities chowing down on one another. The famously rude waiters at the trendy Baguette Pneumatique bistro in mighty, peripatetic Paris and similar sly tweaks relieve the overall plot's grimmer tendencies. Readers will wind up as exhausted as the cast, which, aside from a short encounter with members of the African Zagwan Empire and passing reference to the silk weavers of the eastern Shan Guo kingdom, largely presents white. A rousing, swashbuckling, dystopian romp.(Science fiction. 12-18)

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 16, 2024
In the distant future, mobile cities roam a devastated, hostile landscape, often absorbing one another for resources. When the comparatively benign city of Thorbury is taken over by ambitious Gabriel Strega, who intends to transform Thorbury into the first “apex predator of the brutal new age,” adult tutor Miss Lavinia Torpenhow embarks on a quest to save her home. To help her rescue the son of Thorbury’s late mayor, Max Angmering, from protective custody in Paris, she recruits young Tamzin Pook, a gladiatorial champion from the raft town of Margate. With both Strega’s agents and Tamzin’s former captor hot on their heels, the unlikely band of would-be heroes—and some unexpected allies—travel by land, sea, and air, struggling to survive long enough to fulfill their quest. Reeve (Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time) sets this steampunk adventure a century prior to the events of the Mortal Engines series. Skillfully balancing tongue-in-cheek plotlines with brutal postapocalyptic action and juxtaposing teatime and charming banter with deadly combat and cyborg zombies, Reeve presents a world of airships, wheeled metropolises, and weaponized suburbia as a memorable epic with a rich emotional undercurrent. Major characters read as white. Ages 12–up. Agent: Philippa Milnes-Smith, Soho Agency.

March 1, 2025
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. Martha V. Parravano

(Copyright 2025 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)