Steam

March 1, 2020

Gr 6 Up-After making it out of an abusive foster home, Arlo finds far more danger when he goes to live with his aunt and uncle. While exploring the house, he stumbles upon a massive, steam-powered machine that transports him to the planet of Pother, a steampunk wonderland on the verge of collapse. Arlo's physicist father discovered the planet years ago, created a portal between Earth and Pother, and informed the U.S. government, which drained the planet of its resources. Arlo has always assumed his father was dead, but now there's a chance that they could reconnect with the help of a ragtag bunch of adventurers. Unfortunately, this ambitious graphic novel falls flat. Amid an excess of caricature-like characters and exposition, Arlo gets lost in the shuffle, and his emotional journey from a skeptical, unloved foster child to a boy eager to open up to his newfound family is unsatisfying. Most of the side players are adults; readers will wish for more scenes featuring young people, like the intrepid girl who shows up to help Arlo. While characters' faces are grotesquely exaggerated, the intricately detailed steampunk backgrounds are fantastic, enriched by de la Cruz's superb colors. Ford's allegory for the climate crisis and the need to protect Indigenous cultures is intriguing but underdeveloped. VERDICT Readers will find it hard to connect with this overstuffed graphic novel.-Gretchen Hardin, Bee Cave Public Library, TX

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2020
A young boy is flung into a steam-powered world as he searches for a way to save his lost father and an entire planet in Ford, Leslie, and de la Cruz's debut collaboration. Neglected and abused since his father Henry's disappearance, young Arlo finds a strange machine and is thrown into an alternate world called Pother. New friends explain that Henry has been kidnapped and Arlo is also in serious danger. Two feuding factions--one worships a machine, the other an unseen deity--and spectral planet natives that inhabit the dead would be enough, but there's also the malevolent corporate force from Earth called the Prerogative that is draining Pother's natural resources and killing the planet. Worst of all? Arlo's father is responsible for bringing it to Pother in the first place. Now Arlo must seek out the planet's natives to save both his father and Pother. Despite lively art and a decent stab at steampunk worldbuilding, this graphic novel falls short thanks to an already overdone premise. Plot serves action rather than vice versa and sprints toward a sequel-desperate conclusion, leaving readers with underdeveloped characterization and a confused tangle of plot detail fragments. And even with the benefit of two planets to populate, the novel features a single, extremely peripheral, character of color. Action-packed but fecklessly flat. (Graphic novel. 12-14)

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