Railsea by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Railsea almost returns Mieville to my favor (solving many of his sleepless nights I’m sure). He hasn’t been writing books with any urgency for a while, hopping from genre to genre which would be fine except the imagination and language has seemed muted. I won’t call Railsea an urgent read, but the language and imagination seem revived, and it is a lot of fun. This is yet another YA novel, but Mieville ties that tradition to the 19th century adventure novel were its roots lie, crafting a novel that resembles R.L. Stevenson, nonsense poetry of Lear and Carroll, Miyazaki-style fantasy, and most of all resembling Joan Aiken’s wonderful Wolves books that parody and pay homage to the 19th century novels of Melville, Dickens, Brontes etc. A bit crowd pleasing at times and the narrator is kind of distracting, but I haven’t had fun with or even finished one of his books in a while so will consider this a win.

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