By Faith Erin Hicks
A city conquered so many times that the people who live there refuse to name it, and the friendship that forms between a boy training with the newest occupying army and a fast, sharp-tongued girl who calls its rooftops home.
The Nameless City has been taken over so many times that whoever holds it renames it, and the people who actually live there just call it home. Kaidu is a boy from the Dao, the latest people to rule it, sent to train as a soldier like his father. When he meets Rat, a quick, wary girl who grew up on the city's streets and rooftops, she agrees to teach him to run the roofs the way she does, if he brings her food. Their friendship crosses a line their two worlds don't want crossed, and it puts them right in the path of a plot to seize the city by force.
This sits at the grown-up end of the graphic-fantasy shelf, and it's the one I'd hand to a child who loved the sweep of Amulet and wants stakes that feel real. The world is layered and political, built on questions of who a place belongs to and what it costs to hold by force, but what carries it is the friendship between two children on opposite sides. The rooftop chases move like an action movie, and Jordie Bellaire's color work is gorgeous.