Writing-wise, this is a children’s book, not YA. It’s simple but quite serviceable writing and has a really gonzo setting. The characters are kind of simple, but are pretty good, particularly the part where the female ones exist. My biggest issue with it is it doesn’t spend enough time engaging with the setting and it gives the wrong amount of info about it, but it still does surprisingly well there.

Let’s face it, the idea cities are all rolling around chasing each other is ridiculous. Physics just won’t work. I’m willing to ignore that for the sake of it being such an awesome idea, but it’s hard when the book kept trying to tell me this wasn’t an alternate universe but just the far future. (Although I did like the reference to the original cities being mounted on wheels in response to an ice age instead of people jumping straight to hunting other cities.)

Meanwhile, there wasn’t enough explanation for the world currently. At one point the characters are horrified to jump onto a pirate city, which is different from a regular one because…? We’re told they didn’t bother giving people time to leave their city, but it wasn’t clear before this that this was a big deal, and it doesn’t make much sense that the city devouring is followed by the inhabitants all jumping ship to the new city, since that’d just make the resource crunch even worse – yet there’s also no sign that the people generally end up homeless on the ground, since we don’t see any sign of them during the main character’s walkabout. Apparently the pirates kill or enslave the few who get off as opposed to how the cities do it which is…? There’s certainly the sense the established cities have this whole rationalization and code going on, but it’s not made clear what that code is and if it actually means anything. And what we do get doesn’t make much sense – the main character is very offended by the idea of static cities and repeatedly says that if they didn’t want to get eaten they should’ve put on wheels, but all the cities we see eaten are on wheels and the central premise of the book is that everyone eats everyone they can. Static cities should be a godsend. It’s trying to show how the moving cities rationalize it being okay to attack the static ones, but the main character comes off like a raccoon offended by the idea not all food tries to escape.

It’s also not clear how the city-ecology works. They’re definitely running out of prey at the moment and we’re told things are unsustainable by some characters, but it’s not clear if there’s a finite number of cities because they’re out of the resources to build more now and so this is just an absolute law or if some small static settlements can always manage to eventually build themselves up into something mobile and it’s just it’s not happening nearly fast enough to replace the number who get eaten. In the latter case the city model is still technically workable, they just have too many predators at the moment but those will eventually starve and be devoured by the smaller ones until things are more functional. The unsustainable side’s credibility isn’t the best, I though, especially when near the end they argue against it on the basis that London is looking at several thousand years of plenty, but what about after that? And it’s really weird for the side that seems more reasonable to be the nutjobs burning t-rexes worth of oil moving an entire city around to chase other cities doing the same thing.

Things are further undercut by the fact there’s an entire nation worth of normal cities beyond the pass. We see a lot of smaller cities throughout the book that seem to have decided to hide out and stay still to do farming and such, so why not just leave and join the nation of people who are sick of cannibalizing each other, especially when they seem to be doing miles better than any of the moving cities? When we’re first told there’s people who oppose the moving cities, it seems like they’re a handful of conscientious objectors making a moral choice, but then we find out it’s actually the objectively best choice as well.

I think they’re there to give a clean happy ending for the main characters to escape to, but it’s a book about cities eating each other and having a chunk of normal cities undercuts that. London’s superweapon could’ve just been meant for the other existing cities. The rest of the book makes a perfectly good argument for the death of moving cities – the constant mention of how resources are running out, the sight of a city that “died” by using up its fuel, all the smaller cities seen being functionally static, the fact the moving cities have turned the continent into a muddy pulp and so on.

In terms of cast…it’s the best book I’ve read in a while, by several miles.

We have strong female characters. We have a disfigured female character who not only survives the book but gets the boy, and her face isn’t fixed at the end, and her motivating tragedy is the death of her parents especially her mother whose brilliant discovery that she found while having the best job ever also drives the whole of the plot. I don’t even remember what her dad’s job was. She doesn’t get to become an undying cyborg monstrosity, but you can’t have everything and on the whole well worth it for the disfigured-girl-survives-and-gets-the-boy result. We have random female side characters just around there, existing, without paragraphs on how their attractiveness makes them evil/their unattractiveness makes them evil/they are totally such sluts. It’s even suggested later on that the disfigured girl is an out of wedlock kid and this has no reflection at all on her or her mother.

The main character’s male, of course, but he’s pretty good too. He manages to accomplish some impressive stuff, but he’s full of feelings and emotions and not being a cool badass, and in fact, emotions beyond coolly killing stuff are popular among all the major characters, including the ones defined around coolly killing stuff. Girls have feelings! Boys have feelings! Bad stuff happens and people are upset about it! Killing people for good reason is still very traumatizing!

I was left feeling that, simplistic writing or no, this is one of the more mature books I’ve read – it actually engages with both the world and the dilemmas the characters face. I used to like reading YA over adult books because I felt the adult books tended to plod around according to the same few formulas while YA would often be built around exploring an original idea. As just about everything else on this blog shows, that’s not such an accurate generalization these days, but Mortal Engines manages it.