Children of the Flying City (Children of the Flying City #1)

In his children’s debut, Sheehan (Cooking Dirty, for adults) offers up an absorbing, action-packed series opener centering deeply resourceful child protagonists. When he was five, Milo Quick was taken from his father, and then handed to “a different man and a different man after that,” until “escaping became his vocation.” Now almost 13, the presumed-white boy survives on the treacherous streets of congested Flying City Highgate. Part of a gang of child thieves—along with protective, red-haired Jules and pale-skinned, quiet Dagda, who has facial scars—Milo enjoys “all the great and sweeping joys that came from being a child left alone.” When a blockade of airships and waterships creates a growing stranglehold on the city, multiple factions home in on Milo as a person of interest: the cruel Total King of Highgate’s thieves demands increased tithes from Milo’s gang, and the pirates of the airship Halcyon seek to steal him away. As Milo and his friends struggle to stay alive in the increasingly dangerous city, events quickly spiral out of control, revealing Milo’s true purpose. An arch, omniscient narrative—by turns brutal and sweet—unspools into an ambitious, wide-ranging story of survival and loyalty set in a vividly described locale reminiscent of Victorian London. Ages 10–up. Agent: David Dunton, Harvey Klinger. (Mar.)