Steam

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.