Masha du Toit

Title: Mortal Engines
Author: Philip Reeve
Series : First is a series of “The Hungry Cities Quartet”.  Next is Predator’s Gold

Rating:

In Short: In a post apocalyptic world, humans have turned their cities into “traction cities” – huge mobile city sized machines.  These monstrous city-machines move around the deserts that used to be oceans, scavenging one another. Cities eat towns, towns eat villages.  This all seems right and proper to Tom, the apprentice Historian who lives in Traction London.  But one day Tom saves his hero the chief archaeologist Valentine from an assassination attempt – and sets of a series of events that forces him to question everything he believes in.

What I thought: Mortal Engines is a rattling good adventure book.  It contains all the elements of the standard “boys own” story, but just when you are lulled into a seemingly familiar pattern, the story punches the air out of your lungs. More