A Great Find...

The Kid was looking for books on samurai so we went to the local library and I stumbled across Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve in the young adult section. The cover had a great illustration of airships and a steampunk looking city which answered to my burgeoning steampunk fetish. So I checked it out along with the Kid's samurai books and read it at bedtime over the course of a week and, I must say, it's a damn good read. Not as steampunky as the cover would suggest and a bit dark for young adult but I stayed up a bit too late many a night because I couldn't put it down and that's a huge compliment coming from me.

I'm a bit hard on books for many reasons. I'll give a book one chapter and if the writer can't get my attention then I'm done. I don't buy the whole "the second half is better than the first" arguement. The writer should have started with the second half if that was the case.

This book is not very long and if I had to say anything bad, it would be that I wanted some scenes to go a bit longer. That's also odd for me since my main complaint with most books is the writer's excessive use of words. But this was written with a quick, almost break-neck pace and finished almost too quickly. I can easily forgive that though since there are three more books in the series and I'm on the hunt to find them.