SF/fantasy master China Miéville's (Embassytown; Un Lun Dun) newest, Railsea, balances YA elements with classical references, yielding a novel that will satisfy a broad range of readers. The story opens as Shem, the teenaged protagonist, takes part in his first "moldywarpe" slaughter. As a doctor's apprentice on a moletrain (think Moby-Dick, but with monstrous moles instead of whales), Shem dreams of a grander future. A salvaging incident with an abandoned train sends Shem and his mates beyond the bounds of the known world. Their adventure recalls both The Odyssey and Treasure Island, liberally spiced with pirates, politics and plunder.
Miéville's trademark worldbuilding is in full force here, introducing an unsettling future in which the ground below and the air above are a dangerous, shifting morass of oversized rodents, insects and monsters that will as soon devour humans as look at them. His dramatic, playful and inventive prose is often reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. In the book's stylized structure, ampersands take the place of "and" (including in dialogue), and periodic chapters take a bird's-eye view of the action, breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to readers. These stylistic notes can be both a selling point, as they're beautifully integrated, but also a liability, as they may pull less advanced readers out of the story. The plot itself, however, has all the action, young love and dystopic revelations that one could want out of an "all ages" novel. --Jenn Northington, events manager at WORD bookstore