Currently reading
Heading out to sea
I find myself thinking that maybe this was not the place to start with China Mieville.
I read Moby Dick ages ago, and while I appreciated it as art, I didn't particularly enjoy reading it. So whatever posessed me to pick this - a young adult, I believe, retelling of that tale I didn't like in the first place - it wasn't a desire to give Mieville the best possible change to impress me.
And unfortunately, this book did not impress me. It was interesting, with an unusual world, some very varied characters and a plot with a nice mix of adventure, comedy and internal monologue.
But then the characters were kind of uninteresting to me for all their variety, I never really got into the plot and a weird feeling at the end that I wasn't sure anything much had really been accomplished. It had a very kids-making-up-stories vibe to it, which maybe worked for some people. Well, clearly worked for some people since there are plenty of high ratings for this book. But for me it was kind of "Huh?"
I am already having a hard time remembering much about the story that wasn't directly tied into the worldbuilding - its monsters, its cliques and of course its railsea.
I'll probably give another book a go. The voice in this one was interesting to me, and the ideas were stellar. It just didn't interest me near enough.
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