THE PEOPLE OF SPARKS
by Jeanne DuPrau
Corgi, £5.99, 288pp

THE CITY IS WHERE most of us live — yet modern children are likely to learn more about Ancient Rome or Athens than how our own cities evolve. The city of the future is, however, an increasing presence in the territory being carved out by a new generation of children’s writers for whom the rural landscapes of authors from Kenneth Grahame to Tolkien are quaint and remote.

Rail, the protagonist of Chris Wooding’s new thriller, Storm Thief, has most of his face permanently obscured by a respirator — only his breathlessness isn’t caused by asthma but by living in a place in which reality can change at any moment. The island city of Orokos is subject to “probability storms”, in which you can suddenly wake up left-handed, with buildings flipped from east to west, and from which nobody can escape. Rail and his friend Moa are thieves, and what they steal from the monstrous Mozga turns out to be a mysterious artefact from before The Fade that everybody wants.

Not everybody likes fantasies which combine dizzying imaginative detail with action-adventure, but for kids who find fiction second-best to PlayStation games, Wooding is ideal. His debut, The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, went about as far as you could go in macabre fantasy without losing a young audience to full-blown horror; but what makes Storm Thief particularly appealing is the relationship between Rail and Moa.

Both have grown up too fast, surviving with feral agility, but whereas Rail is a realist, serving the thief-mistress of Orokos without question, Moa is a good girl who got lost in the ghetto. The couple are pursued by the thief-mistress’s spy and by the soldiers of the ruling Protectorate but their luck changes when they meet Vago, a winged monster with a metal exoskeleton.

Vago is a heart-rending and superb creation. Once a human murderer, he has been modified to help those in charge clear the ghetto of “the sick and the useless, taking up our food and our space”, but he has a child-like curiosity and learns to love the frail Moa. It is up to his superhuman strength to save the two children as they are forced through the city into the Chaos Engine, where the city will be destroyed or made free. After a breathless chase avoiding ghostly Revenants and criminals, the ending is unexpected, and touching.

The City of Ember was published last year, with its hero and heroine discovering that the underground city they lived in was breaking down, and escaping down a terrifying subterranean river into the outside world.

The People of Sparks tells what happens next. Lina, Doon and the 417 refugees have never had milk that wasn’t powdered or seen a tree or a chicken. The pioneer people of Sparks, outnumbered and barely clinging on to the great empty land they are trying to farm, generously take them in for six months.

Then tensions mount. In The City of Ember and The People of Sparks, Jeanne DuPrau has written one of the important fables of our time, addressing both our fear of annihilation and of immigration, and she has done it with captivating grace and style.

DuPrau is a phenomenal bestseller in America and deserves to be equally well-read here. Lina and Doon, our teenaged heroine and hero, remain as engaging as ever, but this has become the story of a whole people — at first bursting with joy at discovering sunlight, weather and unlimited horizons, then staggering under the complex difficulties of assimilation and survival.

Less exciting but more thoughtful than The City of Ember, The People of Sparks is full of suspense and asks good questions about what we owe each other in a community that may become a city. In contrast to the weird, dangerous, thrillingly dirty city of Wooding, DuPrau’s swells with light, hope and life. It is an optimism that the next generation of urban children need to feel.

WHAT'S MORE...

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YOSS (10+)
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Enter a city of thieves and try to survive.

THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND (10+)
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BASILISK (12+)
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