Fever Crumb/Philip Reeve

Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve; young adult, science fiction; 325 pages

I'm told that there's a lot of foreshadowing in this volume, but since I haven't read Reeve's Hungry City series, most of it was lost on me. I was too caught up in Reeves' world, which is London in the distant future. Technology has been largely lost, and people now engineer devices from what they can excavate (making "archaeologist" a lucrative profession). There's mix of tech here: some of it is very primitive, and some is far advanced, but since people have lost the understanding of how or why things work, much of it is the equivalent of magic. Fourteen-year-old Fever gets caught up in a quest for ancient relics, and meanwhile a group of nomads in great moving buildings threaten the city from the north. I LOVED everything about this book, but I think my favorite part was seeing the way slang had evolved: "blog" is now a curse word, the ruins of Heathrow are known as "Ethrow," etc. I think I'll definitely have to check out the rest of Reeves' books, and I hope this will grow into a series of its own.