#re3 - Mortal Engines

I'm not whether to class this as a book review or a #re3. Because I have read this once before. But it has been over ten years and I can tell you when and where I read this (but I won't due to personal reasons and I don't want the first paragraph within this post to be black and heavy). 

So, why did I decide to reread this? I've been toying with rereading this but the past few months due to the series celebrating its 15th anniversary, and with the movie coming out later this year, it piped my interest. So when I saw it a few months back being 99p, I knew it was time. 

In the future, cities are no one set in one place. They move. They roam. They eat smaller cities. London used to be one of the cities that small cities fear, but it's been in hiding. Now, it's roaming again, and its mayor have sinister plans, and third-class apprentice Tom finds himself caught up in it when he sees an assassin try to kill London's Head Historian, Valentine. When he corners the assassin, he discovers an angry, scarred teenage girl who shouts "Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!" before she jumps down a waste chute. Within minutes, Tom is falling down that same chute, pushed by Valentine... 

And London is racing across the Hunting Ground towards an unknown goal and something is hunting Shaw... 

So, how do I feel about this? Well... kinda the same as I did when I read it the first time round over ten years ago. I liked the idea but I struggled with the execution and the writing style. 

I'm not sure what else I can say about my feeling on it. I really liked this idea of cities being on wheels and moving, eating others. I haven't heard any other books do this or take it to the extreme that Philip Reeve did. And there were elements in here I hooked onto to - the character of Shrike I found fascinating and wanted to know more about him. 

But, there were tings that didn't work for me. There were times I didn't click with the writing. I don't know if it was the writing style or the tone of the book I didn't gel with, but I didn't connect to it in the way I would have liked. And because of this things happened that made me tilt my head and go "That feels odd". Some of the characters and their relationships felt odd at times - rushed in places. I know this was meant to be a standalone novel when it was first published and then it was turned into a four book series, but the relationships ad character developments in this felt off. 

It's a mixed bag for me. I know people who have read this and adore Mortal Engines and the books that follow in this series and its prequel trilogy. But not everyone is going to love the same book so I am at peace with my feelings towards this. Will I consider reading the second book in the series, Predator's Gold? Maybe... It really depends on my mood and on my TBR, which at the moment is all over the place due the events happening behind the scenes... So, we shall see... 

The A to Z of Railhead with Philip Reeve: Letter N

N is for Nova

The Motorik looked back at him with what he supposed was meant to be an encouraging smile. She had a cheap, generic face he'd seen on others of her kind; the eyes too big and too wide apart, the mouth too long. But there were patterns of freckles on her cheeks and across her small, straight nose. Whoever heard of a Moto with freckles?

In the previous entry I wrote about Motorik, the android underclass of my Railhead universe. Nova is one of them, a servant to the character named Raven who employs my hero at the story’s start and draws him into danger. I originally had another heroine in mind; Nova was just there to open doors and dump some exposition. But when I started writing about her I found that she had a sense of humour, and a story of her own, and she quickly started to take over. She seems more curious than other Motorik, or maybe just more open about her feelings (and about the fact that she has feelings). She doesn’t mind being a machine - she knows that she’s a very superior model - but she’s fascinated by humans. In the abandoned beach resort of Desdemor she whiles away her time watching ancient movies from Old Earth, and wondering what it would be like to be human. She’s trying out facial expressions, and she has worked out how to alter the pigmentation settings of her artificial skin to give herself freckles, of which she is very proud. She isn’t trying to pass herself off as human. She isn’t some Pinocchio character, yearning to be a real girl. She just wonders what it would feel like…

(Railhead by Philip Reeve is published by OUP. For more information, you can click here and check out Philip's website. The sketch used on this post was drawn by Ian McQue. You can check him out here to see more of his artwork. My thanks goes to Liz for asking me if I wanted to be involved in this tour - Thanks Liz!)