Philip Reeve drops us a century before Tom and Hester’s escapades and thrusts us into a moment when traction cities still cling to chivalry, hunting codes, and the polite lie that eating a neighbour is sport rather than war crime.
Over four hundred pages he blows that veneer to scrap, showing how honour rusts into brute appetite.We open in Margate, a raft town re-branded as the Amusement Arcade. Picture Blackpool if its selling point were gladiators in a blood-spattered pit. Tamzin Pook, orphan slave and teen killing machine, hacks apart clockwork horrors called Revenants while tourists place bets. Survival has shrunk her world to one iron rule: swing first, breathe later.
Reeve sketches her with brutal economy – shaved head, haunted eyes, scars that spell a childhood sold for box-office receipts – then sets her loose.
Cut to Thorbury, affectionately nicknamed Thunder City for the growl of its engines across the Hunting Ground. Everything looks upright until exiled planner Gabriel Strega hijacks it with a Trojan-suburb stunt: mercenaries hidden inside a captured neighbourhood roll through the gates, gun down the mayor, and flip the polite predator into an apex one.
Strega wants a rolling super-tank and cites the Scriven wars as proof that honour is obsolete.
Cities must grow or die.
His coup lands like a hammer on china and municipal manners die with a single gunshot.
Enter Miss Lavinia Hilly Torpenhow – schoolteacher, historian, unexpected freedom fighter. When the bullets start, she smuggles the mayor’s kids out a drainage duct, vows to build a resistance, and heads off to find a champion tough enough to tangle with Strega. Her brain says hire a soldier; her gut says recruit Margate’s deadliest gladiator.
Enter Miss Lavinia Hilly Torpenhow – schoolteacher, historian, unexpected freedom fighter. When the bullets start, she smuggles the mayor’s kids out a drainage duct, vows to build a resistance, and heads off to find a champion tough enough to tangle with Strega. Her brain says hire a soldier; her gut says recruit Margate’s deadliest gladiator.
Off she goes, parasol and revolver in hand.
The jailbreak that unites Hilly and Tamzin is pure set-piece: forged press passes, a Revenant rampage, a screaming zip-line across the arena gantry. By the time the dust settles the pair are fugitives with an airship to steal, a runaway heir to kidnap back from Paris, and a tyrant to dethrone.
The jailbreak that unites Hilly and Tamzin is pure set-piece: forged press passes, a Revenant rampage, a screaming zip-line across the arena gantry. By the time the dust settles the pair are fugitives with an airship to steal, a runaway heir to kidnap back from Paris, and a tyrant to dethrone.
Reeve’s pacing is merciless fun. Every chapter detonates a new calamity – air-patrol dogfights, sewer chases under Café Gaulois, a floating spa town cut loose and ditched into the sea, a Zagwan submarine staffed by bomb-planting octopi.
The plot never idles; it upshifts then grins and throws another curve.
Tamzin’s arc is the novel’s spine. Freed from Margate, she is not instantly heroic – she is feral, jumpy, convinced kindness is a con. Watching her thaw is riveting. A survivor learns to wield righteous fury instead of reflex murder. When she faces a Revenant built from her fallen friend – a grotesque exploitation by Dr Mortmain – she flips horror into deliverance.
Tamzin’s arc is the novel’s spine. Freed from Margate, she is not instantly heroic – she is feral, jumpy, convinced kindness is a con. Watching her thaw is riveting. A survivor learns to wield righteous fury instead of reflex murder. When she faces a Revenant built from her fallen friend – a grotesque exploitation by Dr Mortmain – she flips horror into deliverance.
She wins the fight then redirects her rage toward dismantling the system that forged her, echoing Hester Shaw’s later duel with the violence inside herself.
Hilly Torpenhow is the perfect foil. She is tea-sipping resolve, quoting dusty treaties while wiring dynamite. She drags everyone toward their better selves through sheer moral gravity and keeps a notebook on her belt because history must be recorded, not buried. London’s scholars once hid truths for safety; Hilly writes them down for accountability, a quiet rebellion against collective amnesia.
Supporting players pop like fireworks. Oddington Doom, gin-soaked Aussie merc, delivers comic relief yet still drops enemies at fifty paces. Max Angmering, runaway heir, begins as a café-hopping layabout but adversity sandblasts him into something resembling a leader. When he yields the mayoral chain to his younger sister Helen, Reeve plants a feminist seed: the next great traction innovator may be the book-loving girl who watched her city crumble.
Strega and Mortmain split villain duty without stepping on each other’s steel-toed boots. Mortmain is sadism at retail scale – a circus barker who sells pain as spectacle. Strega is ideology with teeth. He tears through Thorbury’s green spaces to make room for new engines, echoing the urban sprawl William Blake railed against and the industrial wasteland of SF Said’s Tyger. Parks are paved, allotments uprooted, and the city’s lungs fill with soot.
Hilly Torpenhow is the perfect foil. She is tea-sipping resolve, quoting dusty treaties while wiring dynamite. She drags everyone toward their better selves through sheer moral gravity and keeps a notebook on her belt because history must be recorded, not buried. London’s scholars once hid truths for safety; Hilly writes them down for accountability, a quiet rebellion against collective amnesia.
Supporting players pop like fireworks. Oddington Doom, gin-soaked Aussie merc, delivers comic relief yet still drops enemies at fifty paces. Max Angmering, runaway heir, begins as a café-hopping layabout but adversity sandblasts him into something resembling a leader. When he yields the mayoral chain to his younger sister Helen, Reeve plants a feminist seed: the next great traction innovator may be the book-loving girl who watched her city crumble.
Strega and Mortmain split villain duty without stepping on each other’s steel-toed boots. Mortmain is sadism at retail scale – a circus barker who sells pain as spectacle. Strega is ideology with teeth. He tears through Thorbury’s green spaces to make room for new engines, echoing the urban sprawl William Blake railed against and the industrial wasteland of SF Said’s Tyger. Parks are paved, allotments uprooted, and the city’s lungs fill with soot.
Reeve lingers on the toppled oaks, the broken glasshouses where songbirds once nested, until readers feel nature’s death rattle beneath the steel. This is the destructive cost of progress: the more efficient Thorbury becomes, the less human it feels.
Humour keeps the tragedy from strangling the tale. Jokes and pratfalls burst like fireworks even in dire straits. Doom staggers into a gunfight yelling about overdue bar tabs; Hilly insists on proper table manners while planning sabotage; Parisian waiters remain snooty while bullets whizz overhead. The laughter never undercuts the stakes – it sharpens them, reminding us what must be saved.
Reeve threads a Blakean lament through the carnage. The great Romantic warned of factories turning men into cogs; Thunder City updates that vision with rolling cities eating the world. As Thorbury’s parks vanish beneath iron treads, innocence follows. One character muses that perhaps the city was always hungry and Strega merely fed it, a dark idea that used him as vessel. That line lands like prophecy: remove one tyrant and another will rise unless the idea itself is starved.
The name of Strega’s mercenary crew tightens the thematic screws. The Boethius Brigade nods to the sixth-century philosopher who reconciled free will with divine foreknowledge.
Humour keeps the tragedy from strangling the tale. Jokes and pratfalls burst like fireworks even in dire straits. Doom staggers into a gunfight yelling about overdue bar tabs; Hilly insists on proper table manners while planning sabotage; Parisian waiters remain snooty while bullets whizz overhead. The laughter never undercuts the stakes – it sharpens them, reminding us what must be saved.
Reeve threads a Blakean lament through the carnage. The great Romantic warned of factories turning men into cogs; Thunder City updates that vision with rolling cities eating the world. As Thorbury’s parks vanish beneath iron treads, innocence follows. One character muses that perhaps the city was always hungry and Strega merely fed it, a dark idea that used him as vessel. That line lands like prophecy: remove one tyrant and another will rise unless the idea itself is starved.
The name of Strega’s mercenary crew tightens the thematic screws. The Boethius Brigade nods to the sixth-century philosopher who reconciled free will with divine foreknowledge.
We can choose but history already knows what we will decide. Reeve turns that paradox into narrative fuel. The citizens of Thunder City can shuffle, charge, or goose-step, yet the gears of Municipal Darwinism still grind in the same direction.
Hilly fights for a gentler path, Tamzin claws for freedom, Strega accelerates the march, but the traction wheels keep rolling. The novel’s final pages hammer the point: even after Strega falls, Thorbury continues its industrial upgrade, proof that a single victory cannot derail destiny.
Lore collectors will swoon.
Lore collectors will swoon.
We tour Paris on caterpillar tracks, dine in an airborne spa renting gravity by the hour, glimpse Zagwa’s submarine empire patrolling the Middle Sea, and meet outlaw Revenant engineers selling animal-brain cyborgs because human Stalkers are officially banned.
History buffs catch stray signals of bigger storms – Hamburg plotting its doomed crusade on the Shield-Wall, rumours of Batmunkh Gompa fortifying in the east – while newcomers are never left adrift. Reeve keeps exposition lean, trusting readers to fill gaps with imagination.
The novel’s chronology is sneaky clever. It slots between Fever Crumb and Mortal Engines when Old-Tech stockpiles were emptied, airships still exploded if someone sneezed, and the Anti-Traction League was more rumour than juggernaut. That timing lets Reeve dramatise a world at ethical crossroads.
The novel’s chronology is sneaky clever. It slots between Fever Crumb and Mortal Engines when Old-Tech stockpiles were emptied, airships still exploded if someone sneezed, and the Anti-Traction League was more rumour than juggernaut. That timing lets Reeve dramatise a world at ethical crossroads.
London’s MEDUSA nightmare is a cautionary fable, but predators still believe bigger jaws equal safety. Strega bends that fable into a blueprint and Thorbury follows even after he is gone. Free will chooses the speed; history supplies the road.
Reeve also revisits identity. Tamzin must decide who she is without the arena. Hilly must reconcile genteel upbringing with guerilla tactics. Thunder City itself undergoes an identity crisis, from sporting hunter to unapologetic carnivore. The novel insists technology and ambition are mirrors; stare long enough and you meet your truest self, heroic or monstrous.
Is Thunder City essential to the saga?
Reeve also revisits identity. Tamzin must decide who she is without the arena. Hilly must reconcile genteel upbringing with guerilla tactics. Thunder City itself undergoes an identity crisis, from sporting hunter to unapologetic carnivore. The novel insists technology and ambition are mirrors; stare long enough and you meet your truest self, heroic or monstrous.
Is Thunder City essential to the saga?
Absolutely.
It fills a historical gap, shows the last gasp of traction civility, and explains how honour eroded into engine-oil nihilism. More important, it is a crackling standalone adventure – no homework required though aficionados will grin wider.
It may not reach the operatic heights of A Darkling Plain, but it never tries. Reeve opts for a road-movie vibe: smaller stakes, sharper focus, fireworks every dozen pages, and a punk-rock heart beating under the brass. Think of it as the killer B-side that deepens the album’s mythology.
Most prequels feel like footnotes. Thunder City feels like main text – gritty, generous, alive. By the time Tamzin, Hilly, and company sail off in a patched-up gunship you are hungry for their next gig and freshly wistful for an age doomed to end in fire.
Most prequels feel like footnotes. Thunder City feels like main text – gritty, generous, alive. By the time Tamzin, Hilly, and company sail off in a patched-up gunship you are hungry for their next gig and freshly wistful for an age doomed to end in fire.
The traction engines roll on.
The ride is still wild.
And with Thunder City, Philip Reeve proves he has not run out of fuel; if anything he just stoked the boilers for another lap around the Hunting Ground.
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