Sky Pirates: Echo Quickthorn and the great beyond by Alex English

Echo Quickthorn and the Great Beyond is the start of a dazzling new series featuring mechanical dragons, carnivorous plants, sky pirates and perhaps worst of all … pickled squibnuts! Read on if ye dare… Simon and Schuster

This book has all the ingredients for a rollicking plot and Alex English combines each element into a very satisfying and fast moving adventure.

Ingredients:

• Echo - An orphan living with the royal family - parentage unknown
• Golden Hairpin in the shape of a wolf with an emerald eye - an object owned by Echo and her only connection to her the mother who abandoned her when she was a baby
• An inscription on the hairpin Messrs Evergreen and Spruce, Port Tourbillon Where is this place?
• A prophesy that is an impossible riddle "When Tuesday arrives on a Sunday night ... "
• A Kingdom with strict rules - no one can leave this city. If they do they are sure to die out in the Barren. No one has ever returned.
• Horace - The Crown Prince, son of the King, a boy who likes butterflies but not adventures
• Maps - showing the world is much bigger than the children and citizens have been told
• The arrival of a stranger from the outside - now Echo along with Horace, need to find the truth, and hopefully rescue her mother
• Sky Pirates and Hot Air Balloons and elements of steam punk fiction
• Loyal friends

Blurb: Echo Quickthorn is an orphan and ward of the King of Lockfort She has grown up believing that nothing exists outside the kingdom’s walls and that adventures are taboo. No one in Lockfort looks like her or shares her dreams of exploring. Echo has always felt like maybe she belongs somewhere else, but how can she when all that exists beyond Lockfort is a barren wasteland?

But everything changes when an eccentric professor crash lands his airship outside her bedroom window in the dead of night, claiming to have come from another city and armed with a map of magical, unheard-of places that exist beyond the kingdom walls.

Is this the opportunity she’s been waiting for to go on the adventure of a lifetime? Echo must leave behind everything she knows to discover unimaginable places and finally discover the truth about her family…  LoveReading4Kids

Sky Pirates is due for publication on 5th August and an audio version will also be available. Echo Quickthorn and the great beyond is the first book in the Sky Pirates trilogy. The cover art is by Mark Chambers.

I would pair this book with these:

Seven Professors of the Far North

The Mapmakers Race

Authors of these books have highly praised Echo Quickthorn and the great beyond: