Fire Spell by Laura Amy Schlitz

We open the book to find an old witch Cassandra dreaming of being burned alive.  She wakes remembering a man called Grisini who had told her the opal that gives her her magic would burn her alive.  She tries to smash the stone, then...

We shift to London in the autumn of 1860.  Clara is a upper class young girl hoping that Grisini the puppeteer will be allowed to come to her birthday party.  She lives in material wealth but abject emotional poverty, the only survivor of the cholera that took her 4 siblings including her twin brother.  Her mother's grief makes her home a haunted melancholy place, Clara has to be silent and never to be a child.

Lizzie-Rose and Parsefall are orphans, employed and sometimes fed by Grisini.  Parsefall is learning to play the puppets, Lizzie-Rose does the fetching and carrying.  Dirt poor and unloved they marvel at Clara's house as they bring the puppet stage in.  Paresefall has his mind on petty theivery, but Grisini has something much worse in mind and the children find themselves unwittingly caught up in his spell casting and ancient feud with Cassandra.

A lovely well written book, you can really feel the texture of London both from the viewpoint of Parsefall and Lizzie-Rose struggling to stay alive and Clara who has the money to pay road sweepers to clear the roads of horse dung for her should she step down from her carriage.  Schiltz conjures the cold, the filth, and the suspense as the narrative hurtles onward.  A great read for I would say 9-13 year olds.

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare (Book #2 of the Infernal Devices)

This second book of Clare's Infernal Devices series was a great read. Tessa Gray is living under the protection of the Insitute in a London that features all the dirtiness, darkness and danger of Dickens but with a new layer. Magic and magical beings exist but are invisible to 'mundanes': people without magic. The Nephilim are half angel law enfocers of this world and are at war with the nefarious Magister, a creator of clockwork minions. Tessa can shape change into a person if she touches something of importace to them, but she is a mystery to herself and those around her, with the power of those known as warlocks but missing their marks of inhumanity.

But Charlotte and Henry Branwell, heads of the Enclave and Tessa's protectors, are also at war with divisions within her own ranks, particularly with the devious Benedict Lightwood and his machinations to have her ousted. The Institute are given two weeks to find the Magister by Consul Wayland, head of the Enclave, and a breakneck story takes off. Tessa has to cope with one twist and turn after another as she comes face to face with her brother - who betrayed her and is working with the Magister - with her questions about what she is, with betrayal from those around her and with her powerful feelings for the two Nephilim who brought her to the sanctuary of the Institute: Will and Jem.

As in the first book, Clare's plotting is tight and fast paced but combined with the passion and emotion of teenage love sesitively handled with an excellent understanding of Victorial norms and morals.

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare (Infernal Devices #1)

16 year old Tessa Grey is arriving in Southampton from New York on board the steamship the Main.  Her American aunt, leaving her alone and Tess is more than ready to be reunited with her brother Nathan at the docks and travel with him to their new home in London.  He is not there to meet her and she goes willingly with the strange people sent to meet her on his behalf, but they are not benign.  Kept prisoner by the sinister Dark Sisters she is forced to undergo changes that drive her to the edge of madness.  At last she is rescued in a shower of rubble by two strange boys her own age and pitched into a world where magic and the supernatural live alongside and unseen by 'normal' people.

A great steampunk evocation of Victorian London with a supernatural twist, very well written and plotted.  Any book that opens with the lines. 'London.  April 1878.  The demon exploded in a shower of ichor and guts' is going to get my attention, but Clare kept me gripped beyond for the full 472 pages of this book.  Mostly written from Tessa's point of view, Clare never loses the pace of the plot but also deftly handles the compelling developing relationships between the characters of her book in a way that is commensurate with the mores and conventions of society at the time.

Pastworld by Ian Beck

A really entertaining read.  The year is 2050 and the world is a little bland, but for those with the money they can escape via airship to Pastworld, a futuristic theme park, a re-creation of Victorian London in all it's immensity, dirtiness and viciousness.  No electrical or electronic items are allowed, anything brought in by the visitors (Gawkers) has to be authentic.  In this world of gaslight, horse drawn cabs, poverty and noise lives Eve, a 15 year old girl who does not know that the stars above her head are a sky dome and that her guardian's reluctance to let her go outside is to protect her from the knowledge that her London is not real.  When Eve runs away from home a carnival of adventure and excitement is set in motion with a fabulous cast including a Jack-the-Ripper style villan with his band of dangerous raggedy men, carnival acrobats, bearded women and dwarves, pickpockets and spiritualist seances.