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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Endlessly inventive . . . [a] hybrid of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Phantom Tollbooth."--Salon What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too-including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book. When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong. Praise for Un Lun Dun "Miéville fills his enthralling fantasy with enough plot twists and wordplay for an entire trilogy, and that is a good thing. A-."--Entertainment Weekly "For style and inventiveness, turn to Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville, who throws off more imaginative sparks per chapter than most authors can manufacture in a whole book. Mieville sits at the table with Lewis Carroll, and Deeba cavorts with another young explorer of topsy-turvy worlds."--The Washington Post Book World "Delicious, twisty, ferocious fun . . . so crammed with inventions, delights, and unexpected turns that you will want to start reading it over again as soon as you've reached the end."--Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners "[A] wondrous thrill ride . . . Like the best fantasy authors, [Miéville] fully realizes his imaginary city." --The A.V. Club "Mieville's compelling heroine and her fantastical journey through the labyrinth of a strange London forms that rare book that feels instantly like a classic and yet is thoroughly modern."--Holly Black, bestselling author of The Spiderwick Chronicles… (more)
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Chine Miéville isn’t known for holding back on ideas. And here, making the transition into children’s literature (because it is. There’s nothing YA about this, the way I understand that tricky label), with a nod on the head to the proud British word-punning tradition that urban fantasy for all ages tends to love, he lets it all out. In the parallel abcity of UnLondon, where Zinna and her friend Deeba find themselves, there’re feral rubbish piles. Extreme librarians. Wandering bridges. Transhbinjas. Brokenbroll, the boss of the broken umbrellas. Electric conductors. A half-ghost street urchin. Webminster Abbey. A impenetrable jungle inside a regular brick building. A book of prophecy with an identity crisis. A silent, friendly giant in a diver’s suit. Rebel words. And a cloud of Smog with evil plans of taking over everything – UnLondon and London alike. And some trademark Miéville nasties to top it off, of course: lions with earthworm heads. Smombies. Carnivorous giraffes which flay the skins of their prey, waving it like flags…
This is wall to wall adventure, of the “impossible to put down” variety, with a neat feel of unpredictability to it. True, at the bottom of this story is the rather standard young fantasy theme of “I know nothing about this strange land, but I’m Chosen to save it”. But if you bear with it, it becomes more and more apparent Miéville knows exactly what he’s doing with that, too. Still, the overall story is not quite as original as the details. But I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone over the age of ten.
I came across Un Lun Dun mere weeks after I had finished Miéville's most famous work from 2000, Perdido Street Station. As the story of Un Lun Dun gets underway, it seems in many ways to be a New Crobuzon for kids. The magical city of UnLondon, existing kind of parallel but not quite to our more familiar English capital, a strange and marvelous place where the spectacularly outlandish is pedestrian, is in may ways reminiscent of the sprawling steampunk metropolis featured in his earlier books. The bizarre and ever present horror of the antagonist falls in the same vein as the previous work's monstrous villains. Even Miéville's willingness to kill significant characters in a series of disturbing false climaxes creates the effect of tying the two books together.
Though it holds some very real similarities to his earlier work, Un Lun Dun does more than enough to stand up on its own as a fantasy novel and a fantastic story for both young and old. The adolescent heroes, drawn from a common schoolyard in London and nearly inexplicably thrown into a strange new world exhibit both the trepidation and panache that young teenagers harbor by the bucketful. The people, critters, and very structure of UnLondon is completely bizarre, but the disparate bits seem to fit together so well that the reader can accept when buses fly and trashcans are trained in ancient mystical martial arts. Even if there were no hero-quest to drive the story along, one could be perfectly content to read about the happenings of a single street corner for a hundred pages. Thankfully, we are given the chance to see much more of this stunning "abcity" as it falls under siege by a beast of its own making in a war that binds together both their and our London under threatening clouds. As mentioned above, Miéville is one of the few fantasy writers I know with the courage to let people die in the immensely dangerous situations that fill this story, and has a knack at teasing us with failure the likes of which we know so well and most storybook heroes know not at all. He also exhibits an excellent working knowledge of the structure of such stories, which allows him to deftly undermine their very workings and twist common motifs into new, real-feeling events and characters.
The characterization in Un Lun Dun is relatively simple and the language such that a clever young person (whom I think exist more often than not, if we give them some credit) should have no problem following along. If these are to be seen as flaws, then they are more than made up for by a complex, subversive plot and marvelously strange sights that fill most every page of this hefty and satisfying book. For ever twist you see coming, there's at least one more that will hit you out of left field and leave both the young readers, and the readers who are old enough to know that the young have better taste than they sometimes admit, salivating for more stories of the uncanny UnLondon and its heroes.
Un Lun Dun is a world parallel to and offset from
Just for a taste: those jumping bins on the cover are the binja, fierce fighters and protectors of the realm. Un Lun Dun has houses made of giant apples, or that contain entire large jungles, and anything from a piece of rubbish to a school of fish can be a person. There are Extreme Librarians, a sentient book of prophesies, and a half-a-ghost. And there are Evil Giraffes! Someone tell Eddie Izzard at once!
This one is written for a younger audience than Miéville's other books. (Or most of them, anyway. I haven't yet read Railsea, but I gather that one falls somewhere in the YA category.) It's every bit as weird and wonderful and endlessly inventive as his adult fiction, though, and although it started out a bit slow, by the end the story had me utterly enthralled, and I finished it up with a great big grin on my face. I particularly like the way Miéville takes so many of the usual fantasy tropes about prophecies and Chosen Ones and quests and turns them neatly on their heads. This one's definitely recommended for both adults and kids.
Also, I will never, ever look at an empty milk carton the same way again.
I did like the alternate London that Mieville
The disconnected nonsense of it all, which reminds me of such classics, also makes it very hard to read. I didn't always remember which character was who (or what their idiosyncrasies were), and didn't really care.
If you like meandering, episodic, and clever fantasy, and if you're a very patient reader, then give it a try.
It's certainly got the Mieville touch when it comes to fantasy ideas, man eating giraffes? ninja rubbish bins? roaming bridges?
The story is simpler then I am used to, and tends to run from one set piece to other but that’s certainly not a bad thing. I was worried at first as it did seem to be a kids fantasy by numbers, with the heroine, who everyone loves going on a series of quests with her convenient helpers but don’t worry this trope is nicely subverted quite soon into the story. The characters are ok, a bit on the chirpy side for me and a bit flat but the bad guy suitably malevolent and they all bounce off each other to keep the interest going. The plot races on at a fair old pace too and it’s interspersed with some great action (when’s the film?)
It fun and engaging enough to recommended to YA lovers or those who find Mieville’s other books a bit too baroque and the over the top. I did enjoy it but I do prefer Mieville at full tilt ;)
What they discover is astonishing. They emerge in UnLondon, a place all the lost and broken things of London fall too, and are efficiently utilised by the inhabitants of the city. But they're also emerged at a bad time, as there are mutterings and threats in the air, and when the citizens begin to show an unusual amount of attention towards Zanna, the girls find they must flee to safety.
The following excerpt gives some idea as to the nonsensical and fantastical found within the pages:
"From these heights, Deeba could see the UnLondon-I, the flickering of Wraithtown, the dark tiles of the Roofdom. She could see the glimmer of the river bisecting the city, the two enormous iron crocodile heads squatting on either side of it.
The night sky crawled with moving stars. A flying bus cut across the front of the loon. ... In the midst of the roofscape of mixed-up architecture, of huge tiger paws and apple cores and weirder things that served as houses alongside more conventional structures, was a darkness."
Binjas (ninja dustbins), murderous giraffes, Slaterunners and Webminster, everything within UnLondon is weirder and more wonderful than that above, but as the threat from the Smog grows, it falls to an unlikely source to save the city.
The acknowledgements at the end mention Neil Gaiman as a source of encouragement and inspiration, and there are more than a few similarities here to Neverwhere, which is surely a ringing endorsement for those who love this kind of bizarre and eccentric fantasy. Mieville has the same love of the strange and twisted, and each new creature spawned from his imagination is a wonder to behold. The occasional illustrations dotted through the book are a pleasant surprise, and the story twists and turns with a plot that makes you eat up the pages and never guess what might be coming next.
Two things bothered me about this novel. First, I didn't get the function of the Zanna story. She fails to save Un Lun Dun, the two girls are returned home, Zanna remembers nothing, and essentially disappears from the story. It's Deeba, the unchosen one, whose adventures make up most of the novel. OK, the idea that she's unchosen and still succeeds may be intriguing, but the first sections of the book seem extraneous to the rest.
Second, and this is English teacher in me -- I don't know why Deeba sometimes lapses into subject/verb disagreement. I know children sometimes speak this way, but it made me shudder every time she said something like "She don't know anything."
Quibbles aside, I think most kids (of any age) who like fantasy ala Harry Potter and The Wizard of Oz would thoroughly enjoy Un Lun Dun.
Before starting Un Lun Dun, I knew it was targeted at a much younger audience than Perdido Street Station, my previous exposure to Mieville. This work shows the author’s versatility, yet something was missing from making this a full fledged success.
For one thing, I felt the theme was a little too heavy handed for the Juvenile Fiction readers this book seems aimed at. If he had aimed a little higher with his target audience, maybe making the main characters a little more into their teens, he could have created a successful Young Adult novel instead of a mediocre Juvenile Fiction story.
Gaiman was light with his geographic puns (Earl’s Court being a real court of an earl), but Mieville is beating us over the head with a villain named Smog that is made of noxious fumes. The anagrams were too obvious for older readers and the better puns too obscure for the younger readers.
Despite this, I was carried along to the story’s conclusion without the need for forcing myself to stay with it. The book does have a nice flow to it, somewhat like The Phantom Toll Booth, but nowhere near as classic in its appeal.
If you are a fan of Mieville, try this to see another side of the author. If you are looking for some light reading that may be interrupted by another book, or sporadic reading between other things, this could be for you. While above average, I would hardly consider this a great read. It is worth trying, though.
Following several curious encounters with animals and a near fatal incident involving a mysterious black cloud, two London girls, Zanna and Deeba find themselves
The premise is familiar and seems derived from equal parts "Alice in Wonderland", "Neverwhere" and "The Phantom Tollbooth" but gradually, Mieville is able to subtly subvert some of the cliches and conventions of this kind of tale. There is a particularly gratifying twist regarding the story's central character that I won't spoil here.
It took me a while to get into this book and I was, at first, turned off by the heavy-handedness of the environmental message and the author's unfortunate tendency towards pun names ("Binjas", "Smogladytes", "Webminister Abbey", which is full of "Black Windows"). However, at about the halfway point the story really kicks in and proceeds rapidly to a satisfying climax.
Lots of colourful creatures, a strong heroine and an exciting last act allow me to recommend this book to any readers of YA fantasy, and I haven't even mentioned the carniverous Giraffes.
Un Lun Dun received the 2008 Locus award for best Young Adult Book.
first line(s) (of the first chapter): "There was no doubt about it: there was a fox behind the climbing frame. And it was watching."
From the cover art (somewhat
The cast of characters are unusual in this not so subtle, but refreshing, story of enviromental impact. In her quest to defeat the Smog,
As in all hero stories she has her doubts and fears, but a true hero wins in the end. I would have loved this book to have begun after the true Swazzy went back to real London. More judicious editing would have helped make this book shorter and kept the anticipation high. As is, the book tends to build and build, momentum is lost and the reader puts the book down because it just goes on and on and on.
For those intrepid enough to plow through all of the chapters to the last 5, the story has a grand climax and denoument.
A poor man's [Neverwhere]. I'll admit that I stopped reading after 115 pages.
I read several glowing reviews of this, saying it was going to rescue us in this, the time of no-more-harry-potter. And lookee! It has female protagonists! But no. A typical
a) It is, at least in the first 115 pages, entirely plot-driven. I know nothing about what separates the two main characters from one another--they're both young girls from London, and other than physical differences, they talk alike and seem to think alike. The other characters are defined for you; they do not have characters and backstory, they just are. Sometimes their "properties" and abilities are defined, but that's about it. The 115 pages I read were propelled entirely by one plot point after another. One of the great things about [The Golden Compass] series is that the characters are so rich and familiar--there is love and compassion and yearning--those are what drives the narrative.
b) Sadly, I think this book suffers from "sci-fi syndrome". Given that I have no personalities to sink my teeth into, I need to be able to grab onto some part of this world. In many sci-fi books--and this is no exception--the author is so busy cleverly creating new creatures, new worlds, and new vocabularies, that they don't notice they've given readers a whole lot of homework. When a paragraph contains 5-6 made up words describing scenery, characters, or the quest, the reader (me) gets bogged down. I felt like I was slogging through a foreign language.
[[Neil Gaimen]]'s [Neverwhere] treads similar territory--London, but not--and does it in a much more character-driven, riveting, terrifying way. If you're looking for an un-London experience, go read that instead.
Having said that, it is not a bad book. It's central villain - pollution taken form and intelligence - is a worthy adversary for the book this is. The twists are suitable to ask questions of our own consumption and effect on the environment highlighting how our actions can affect others closer or further away.
Overall, a good book, but I was the wrong audience.
When Deeba first
So she does, and along the way must convince not only the denizens of UnLondon that even if she's not the Chosen One, she can still be their champion, but she must also convince herself. Combining elements of Alice and Wonderland and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Mieville gives us quite the no-nonsense heroine.
And, as one of her companions asks her, "Where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?"
The characters are fantastic creations: an old milk carton that acts like a puppy... broken umbrellas that move on their own...
The buildings are also fantastic creations, and the action, well, it's a fast-paced race to see if the Schwazzy (that's Zanna) can save unLondon from the Smog that threatens to eat everything. A terrific read, from beginning to end. And great little sketches by the author to illustrate his bizarre creations. Cool book.