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Summary
Summary
A stunning, new novel by master storyteller Philip Reeve.
Fever Crumb is a girl who has been adopted and raised by Dr. Crumb, a member of the order of Engineers, where she serves as apprentice. In a time and place where women are not seen as reasonable creatures, Fever is an anomaly, the only female to serve in the order. Soon though, she must say goodbye to Dr. Crumb-nearly the only person she's ever known-to assist archeologist Kit Solent on a top-secret project. As her work begins, Fever is plagued by memories that are not her own and Kit seems to have a particular interest in finding out what they are. Fever has also been (cont'd)
Author Notes
Philip Reeve is the bestselling author of the Predator Cities quartet and the award-winning Fever Crumb series. His other books include the highly acclaimed HERE LIES ARTHUR and NO SUCH THING AS DRAGONS. He lives in Dartmoor, England with his wife and son. Visit him online at philip-reeve.com.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exciting steampunk adventure, Carnegie Medal-winner Reeve takes readers to a far future that looks back at our era with a darkly humorous sensibility (how's "Blog off," for an expletive?), while laying tantalizing groundwork for his Hungry City Chronicles quartet. Fever Crumb, a 14-year-old orphan, is the only girl ever accepted into the Order of Engineers and has been raised in seclusion by obsessively logical scientists in an enormous head, part of an unfinished statue of London's deposed ruler, the hated mutant "Scriven," Auric Godshawk. But Fever's thoroughly rational nature is thrown into flux when she's sent into the bustling, violent city on her first job, working for an eccentric archeologist who may have discovered Godshawk's secret cache of scientific inventions. As invaders near the city's outer perimeter, the streets of London erupt in mob violence, and Fever finds herself proclaimed a mutant and pursued by an implacable enemy. Beautifully written, grippingly paced, and filled with eccentric characters and bizarre inventions (such as foldable assassins made of paper), this is a novel guaranteed to please Reeve's fans-and very likely broaden their ranks. Ages 12-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Reeve opens with an orphan abandoned, Moses-style, in a basket; the construction of soldier boys from paper; and the skins of long-defeated mutant overlords flapping like flags in the breeze -- and that's just the beginning. Fever Crumb, the aforementioned orphan, has been raised by London's Order of Engineers to be rational above all else. Her first assignment puts that to the test, as her new colleague, archaeologist Kit Solent, reveals her connection to his project: she has been implanted with the memories of deceased inventor Auric Godshawk, a Scrivener (a mutated strain of humanity) and the former ruler of London. One vigilante's belief that Fever herself is a reviled Scrivener; the imminent arrival of a prototypical, conquest-bent traction city; and Kit's excavation of a long-buried secret converge in the kind of intricate, inevitable climax that characterized Reeve's Hungry City Chronicles (Mortal Engines, rev. 11/03). Fans of that series will find plenty of treasurable nuggets (including the genesis of the Stalker Grike) in this snapshot of the birth of Municipal Darwinism, but newcomers won't be left behind: Fever Crumb has mysterious origins, technological wonders, and sociopolitical complexities all its own. Touches of whimsy balance the high-minded themes, and if Fever is no iconic Hester, she is nevertheless a sterling example of Reeve's ability to depict the universals of human nature as shaped by an utterly foreign set of social conventions and conditions -- and to bring that society vividly to life. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Set some centuries before the Hungry City Chronicles, yet still well into the future, this prequel series opener stars young Fever Crumb, reared by the Order of Engineers in the massive head of an unfinished statue, to operate with a slavish devotion to logic. (In one delightful scene, a group of engineers pours out of the head's nostril door like a highly educated sneeze ). Uncertain of her heritage, as well as the source of the memories invading her mind, Fever embarks on a rather typical quest of discovery with anything-but-typical trimmings. London is a nearly medieval backwater, where relics of ancient technology hint at a time thousands of years ago when people still understood how to make circuit boards and microchips. Reeve's captivating flights of imagination play as vital a role in the story as his endearing heroine, hissworthy villains, and nifty array of supporting characters. Although there's all manner of foundation work to gratify readers familiar with the world introduced in 2003's Mortal Engines (including the genesis of Municipal Darwinism and the origins of a very familiar figure), Reeve has crafted a swiftly paced story worthy of standing alone, both in terms of where Fever's adventure may lead her next as well as the connections to the Hungry City Chronicles. It may not be possible for Reeve to ever fully explore this world, but that shouldn't keep him from trying, hopefully in many books to come.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-7-Reeve's "Hungry City Quartet" (HarperCollins) remains a landmark of visionary steampunk imagination, with a future where traction cities roll about chasing down smaller cities, which they devour for parts in an exercise called Municipal Darwinism. Returning to this future, Reeve gives readers a story that takes place decades before the rise of the traction cities and examines the social and political milieu that led to that major societal change. Fever Crumb is the adopted daughter of Dr. Crumb, and the only female member of the Order of Engineers. Taken from the safety of the Order into the streets of London, Fever discovers a world where bands of Skinners have virtually exterminated a mutant race of people with speckled skin known as the Scriven. Suspected of being a Scriven herself, Fever must elude capture while she searches to find out who she really is. The answers she finds have far-reaching implications for the future of the world. Reeve is not just an excellent writer, but a creator with a wildly imaginative mind. The future London setting of this story is well imagined and feels like a place Charles Dickens might have described had he been a science-fiction writer. Plot details such as the origin story of the resurrected cyborg Stalker Shrike will resonate with fans of the earlier titles, but this book can also be read independently by those who are new to Reeve's work. A must for any fantasy collection.-Tim Wadham, St. Louis County Library, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
There's a story that sometime in the 1980s, the Japanese government paid for a kind of state-of-the-art Mass Observation scheme, in which thousands of citizens were asked to keep diaries and store them on huge, metal floppy disks. A snapshot of daily life, a gift to the coming generations. The disks were indestructible - unlike paper - but they are already obsolete. Sometimes our most considered monuments turn out to be nothing but future litter. Future litter is one of the great themes of Philip Reeve's brilliant Mortal Engines series. When I first read these books, I felt as if the pages themselves were charged with electricity. They are set in a remote future in which London has become a huge vehicle - a traction city - roaming around the "darkling plain", swallowing up and asset-stripping smaller settlements in accordance with the laws of "municipal darwinism". It's a heady mixture of the strange and the familiar - Brighton is a slave-trade hub, floating on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. As an image of the future, it's both fantastical and convincing - a kind of steampunk Planet of Slums. Fever Crumb is a prequel to the series. Here London is still stuck to the ground, though it is already being menaced by a coalition of wandering, northern tribes called the Movement. Fever Crumb herself is a foundling who has been brought up in the rarified and ultra-rational atmosphere of the Order of Engineers, who live and work inside the head of a colossal ruined statue - an image that mashes "Ozymandias" with Planet of the Apes . When she is sent out to work on an archaeological dig, her composure and reason are tested, first by the madness of the city itself, and next by the emotional wounds she opens as she uncovers the mystery of her own parentage. Reeve's vision of a society that can no longer afford technology but which is still strewn with the non-degradable detritus of our "civilisation" could not be more timely. Sometimes this detritus is good for a laugh (there's a clever joke about Space Hoppers), and sometimes it's chilling, as when the true nature of "Medusa" is revealed in the earlier books. I occasionally felt uncomfortable in Fever Crumb because of the way these heavyweight issues sit alongside some fairly weedy puns - there's a Krishna-ish cult called Hari Potter, for instance - but I suppose that captures the indifference of time, which will happily reduce the manuscripts of Euripides to dust while inexplicably preserving shopping lists. Bizarrely, Fever Crumb 's London bristles with Bowie references. There's a pub called the Mott and Hoople, and the ferocious Skinners' warcry is adapted from Diamond Dogs. That album in its turn was a response to George Orwell's 1984. Reading Fever Crumb made me nostalgic for the days when books and music talked to each other a bit more. Lord of the Rings, for instance, was surprisingly influential in rock music (T Rex, Led Zeppelin, and so on), board games (Dungeons and Dragons), the hippy press (Gandalf's Garden) and computer games. That doesn't really happen nowadays, when successful books are filmed - and therefore trussed up in copyright law - much more quickly. Even though they are so cinematic, there don't seem to be any immediate plans to film Mortal Engines. Good. It'll be interesting to see what happens to these astonishing, important images if they're allowed to float around in the culture for a while, like pop songs. Fever Crumb is a terrific read, a sci- fiDickens, full of orphans, villains, chases and mysteries. There's even a balloon-chase climax. I worry that if you read it before reading the others, you'll miss out on the electric shock I had when I was plunged straight into that jungle of predator cities. Like The Magician's Nephew , or the story of how your parents met, it's a beginning better told at the end. Frank Cottrell Boyce's books include Cosmic (Macmillan). Caption: article-reeve.1 [Philip Reeve]'s vision of a society that can no longer afford technology but which is still strewn with the non-degradable detritus of our "civilisation" could not be more timely. Sometimes this detritus is good for a laugh (there's a clever joke about Space Hoppers), and sometimes it's chilling, as when the true nature of "Medusa" is revealed in the earlier books. I occasionally felt uncomfortable in Fever Crumb because of the way these heavyweight issues sit alongside some fairly weedy puns - there's a Krishna-ish cult called Hari Potter, for instance - but I suppose that captures the indifference of time, which will happily reduce the manuscripts of Euripides to dust while inexplicably preserving shopping lists. Bizarrely, Fever Crumb 's London bristles with Bowie references. There's a pub called the Mott and Hoople, and the ferocious Skinners' warcry is adapted from Diamond Dogs. - Frank Cottrell Boyce.
Kirkus Review
Rejoice! Reeve returns to the vivid, violent, steampunky world of his Hungry Cities Chronicles. In a still-stationary London, signs of the genocide that killed the mutant Scriven overlords are fading. Teenage Fever Crumb, orphaned in the Skinners' Riots and the only female raised by the eminently rational Order of Engineers, is recruited by an archaeologist who has found a hidden Scriven workshop. But nomads are moving in, Fever is beset by unfamiliar memories and civil unrest is once again taking over. Filled with humor ("blog," as in who gives a, is a swearword) and tackling issues of love, family and power, the author balances the occasional cheap laugh (the Hari Potter cult) or violent death with a finely wrought coming-of-age story starring an unlikely and occasionally unlikable heroine who (like Hester Shaw) becomes a figure of pathos and dignity. Bonuses: the start of Municipal Darwinism, Grike's origins and a glimpse of the real Great Quirke. An essential read for fans and a great entry point for newcomers to the world; here's hoping there's more to come. (Science fiction. 13 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fresh off the Scriven genocide, the people of London are twitchy about folks who look a little different. Fever Crumb is as unique as they come-with a shaved head, two different colored eyes, and a face that is both beautiful and ugly. At 14, she leaves the safety of the Order of Engineers, whose members had raised her, and soon learns the truth about her mysterious origins. As an infant, she was implanted with the essence of Auric Godshawk-the loathsome leader of the mutant Scriven-who longed for immortality. Now she must find her own way in a world peopled by those who would destroy her or use her for their own ends. Why It Is for Us: Fans of Reeve's "Hungry City Chronicles" will devour this first book in a prequel series, which promises to describe the birth of the rolling cities. The uninitiated will delight in being introduced to one of the finest scribes of post-modern science fiction writing today.-Angelina Benedetti, "35 Going on 13," BookSmack! 7/15/2010 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
