Mortal Engines

Starred review from October 27, 2003
Like the moving cities it depicts, Reeve's debut novel is a staggering feat of engineering, a brilliant construction that offers new wonders at every turn. In the Europe of the future, the great cities have uprooted themselves from the Earth and donned wheels; roving the Hunting Ground that was once Europe, cities literally devour one another as part of a new social construct called Municipal Darwinism. The mighty city of London, in danger of running out of "prey," looks toward the east, where an enormous wall protects the static cities of the Anti-Traction League—the "heretics" who have chosen the barbaric practice of living on the bare earth. But London's mad Lord Mayor develops a plan to get through the wall: he resurrects a vicious and ancient technology, a post–20th-century update of the nuclear bomb, all the more horrible with time and refinement, and mounts it in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. Against this wildly original backdrop plays the story of Tom Natsworthy, a young Apprentice Historian who helps mine the museum vaults of the juggernaut London. Tom becomes embroiled with his idol, the elder Historian Valentine, and also with the scarred girl Hester who owes Valentine a debt of vengeance. Reeve's prose is sweeping and cinematic, his ideas bold and effortless; he deftly weaves in social commentary on the perils of both war and consumerism, and presents the calamities that can result from poverty and extreme wealth occupying the same quarters. Ages 12-up.

Narrator Barnaby Edwards is fully a partner in the world-building of this exciting young adult novel. In the far future after a terrible war, mobile cities brutally consume each other for resources in a system called "Municipal Darwinism." Edwards establishes voices for highborn Londoners, who live in luxury on the city's top tiers, and differentiates them from the workers who toil away in the Gut. He creates diverse accents for the aviators, pirates, Anti-Traction League spies, and other characters who hail from locations around the globe. And he adopts a terrifying hiss for a Stalker, a half-man, half-machine relic of the long-ago war. As a young woman tries to avenge her parents' deaths and London unveils a devastating new weapon, Edwards's narration carries listeners along on the breathless adventure. J.M.D. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine