Fever Crumb

Author: Philip Reeve
Ages: 13+
Rating: 3/5

About: Fever is a girl who was raised to be an engineer in a future version of London, England even though females are not considered to be capable of rational thought. But Fever is proving to be a strong apprentice, until she starts getting vivid images in her mind, memories that are not her own.

Thoughts: I was pretty disappointed by this novel. It seemed like such a neat idea, and the reading was pretty exciting for about the first half of the book. I kept expecting something great to happen, something intriguing or jarring, but the story just flat-lined.
Part of my dis-interest may have come from the character of Fever. She was brought up by engineers who believed that people ought to be rational above all else. Showing emotion was not rational. So Fever shows very little emotion throughout the novel, and always came up with rational explanations for everything. Both of these tendencies made her character uninteresting. When she could have been moving the plot forward and being an instrument in her own fate, she would brush off odd occurrences with the simplest and most logical explanation (which was often the wrong one), and instead of forming bonds with the characters around her she thought them irrational and would concentrate on the sequence of pi. So all the work to make the story interesting fell to supporting characters and a lot of running around (literally).
Overall it was a fun read, but it didn't meet my expectations for a great or memorable story.