Mortal Engines

I am not a fan of YA fiction, but after I saw the preview for the upcoming Jackson movie version, I decided I needed to check out the original. I was pleasantly surprised I did, and I even bought the second book in the series. (Thankfully all the books are stand-alone stories, as I can't stand having to read 3 to 4 books just to get the full story.)

Set in a future distant from our own on a post-apocalyptic Earth devastated by war, the young protagonist, Tom who is on the cusp of becoming a a man, discovers all that he believes in and idolizes, is a thin veneer of lies by adults who wish to keep himself and the rest of his beloved city-on-wheels, London, in the dark. An assassination attempt literally throws his world into chaos as he discovers, first-hand, pirates, slavers, the enemy of the state, and death at every turn.

What really shook my foundation of belief that YA books are “childish” was the death and destruction in the novel. Not only was there death, but there was violent death. Not overly descriptive, but told straight-forward enough and well enough that there was no question as to what was happening. This may be simply my own inexperience with YA novels, but it was refreshing in a way, and I will be reading the series in complete. Kudos to the author on such beautiful world and character creation.

Through this entire book, I kept thinking “this feels like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.” It's a completely different setting, and a different plot, but it had the same atmosphere. Rollicking action, fantastical premise, crazy setting, huge machines with entire worlds within them. I loved Valerian - it may not have been a critically great movie, and I don't think the leads had much chemistry, but the movie was just FUN. And that's how Mortal Engines is, too.

It's a crazy world, where cities have become mobile - think Howl's Moving Castle - and they chase each other across a barren world, devouring each other for resources in a social order they call Municipal Darwinism. Some cities, like London, are huge, with six main levels, not really counting the Gut, or the center of the machinery. Other towns are small, one or two levels crawling along trying to avoid the notice of the larger, faster cities. The peoples of the Traction Cities think people who live in statics (stationary cities, or, horror of horrors, right on the ground!) or people who are part of the Anti-Traction League, are crazy barbarians. And then there are the airship captains and crews, based out of the one floating city.

It is a crazy steampunk world, and Tom Natsworthy stumbles into a conspiracy plot by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as he travels with Hester across the wasteland, trying to survive their pursuers and avert catastrophe, he learns more about her, and more about how the world actually works.

I absolutely adore the last two sentences of the book, and I'm going to post those here because they aren't terribly spoilery. And they're fantastic.

“You aren't a hero, and I'm not beautiful, and we probably won't live happily ever after,” she said. “But we're alive, and together, and we're going to be all right.”