A review by dr_matthew_lloyd
Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve

4.0

Fever Crumb lives inside a giant head, inside a static settlement called London some time after a civilizational collapse. She is a member of the Order of Engineers, the only girl, who work to understand the old technology and preserve rational thought against an onslaught of gods and other wishy-washy thinking. But inside Fever's head there are memories that aren't hers, and she is somehow connected to hidden plans for London's future that will change her entire world...

Prequels are always a bit weird, although I think Fever Crumb succeeds largely by being far enough back in the past, although an indistinct distance, that there could be dramatic changes between this story and the later ones. As such, I think virtually every element of the story-as-prequel works, bar perhaps one.

I'm not so keen that Kit Solent ends up being Shrike, not so much because it's a bit too neat to have Shrike created at this time, but because there's just not enough to Kit Solent for me to feel that Shrike's peculiarities as a Stalker make sense based on his personality. Is it that most other Stalkers were created from devoted warriors who didn't have or didn't care as much about their kids?

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It doesn't really surprise me, though, that I hardly remembered anything about this story before re-reading compared to the Mortal Engines Quartet. It's good fun in much the same way, but the setting and the characters don't pop as much for me, which is a key part of the Quartet. I am, however, keen to continue on with the series and see where Fever goes from here.