Review Detail

What I Liked: This third installment of the Mortal Engines books takes place 18 years after the events in the first book. Hester and Tom have raised their daughter, Wren, in the isolated static town of Anchorage cut off from the world in America. Wren’s relationship is relatable to many teen/parent relationships. She and her mother get into many fights and her father looks helplessly on trying to stop the quarrels of the ones he loves.
Hester has a growing resentment towards her pretty daughter whom her husband adores. She was well aware of the exact age that Wren first noticed her disfigured face as something different than other mothers’ features and she has grown to steadily dislike her daughter in the years after. Wren spends time contemplating how anyone could love her mother when she is so ugly. However, nothing stops Hester from going to save her daughter when she is kidnapped by the Lost Boy pirates. She has a single focus on tracking her down and repeatedly dismisses the needs of others to achieve her goal.
Things come full circle as we learn the fate of Professor Pennyroyal and the old tech stalker, Shrike, is revived. There has been an all-out war for years and the dead are easily converted to stalkers to keep the cause going strong. Human lives mean very little between the dead being converted to stalkers and the captured being enslaved. The vileness of this practice is only touched on briefly as one lone scientist seeks an end to the war by trying to kill the Stalker Anna Fang.
Bad decisions and several betrayals at the end of the conflict set things up to take a dark turn for the fourth book. It is a good lesson in the perils of not caring about others and continuing others’ downtrodden circumstances without trying to be a helper.
Final Verdict: Once again the audiobook did a nice job of being easy to follow. The author has set the fourth book up to be a clash of many sides and self-pursuits. I do wonder if this society will ever become more responsible for the lives and resources it squanders and the damage it does to the Earth. In the first book, I thought that was going to be a fairly obvious direction for the plot, but it has surprised me that it isn’t a goal of the main characters so far.