Yes! to Mortal Engines


Cities on wheels, devouring other cities: sounds like a kid’s book. And Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines is suited for young adults, but it also does well for adult readers who can suspend their disbelief of the wheeled cities long enough to enjoy the connections between the characters.

In a future Europe, cities like London have grown wheels and hunt around for other cities to devour to sustain themselves. Pitted against these cities and the people who operate them is the anti-traction league, which resists traveling and instead still live stationary lives. Enter the novels main characters, Tom, an historian’s apprentice who works on the wheeled city of London, and worships the elder historian Valentine.

Valentine appears at first to be above board, but is hotly pursued by Hester, who wants him dead. The whys of her vengeance are slowly revealed to the reader; by the time Hester’s reasons are revealed, Reeve has already given the reader investment in all these characters.

While the creativity of cities eating cities might draw you into Mortal Engines, it’s the concerns for Hester, Tom, and Valentine’s daughter Katherine, as well as her pet wolf (named Dog) that keep you there. The writing here is fast-paced, deliciously varied from sentence to sentence, and cinematic. Having seen the Mortal Engines movie released in 2018, I hesitated to read the book: the movie was loud, scattered, and focused on the cities. The book uses the cities as a backdrop, and instead dives deep into the human stories, and in that way is, as is so often the case, much better than the movie.

Thank you to Bridgett Jennings for recommending Mortal Engines. It's the first of four novels in Reeve’s Mortal Engines series, and the first book in a series that I've read in the past two years that made me want to read the others. 

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