Thunder City

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. (Nov.)

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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.