Review: Railhead by Philip Reeve

Published: July 2016

Pages: 299

Synopsis: “Come with me, Zen Starling, she had said. The girl in the red coat. But how did she know his name? The Great Network is a place of drones and androids, maintenance spiders and Station Angels. The place of the thousand gates, where sentient trains criss-cross the galaxy in a heartbeat. Zen Starling is a petty thief, a street urchin from Thunder City. So when mysterious stranger Raven sends Zen and his new friend Nova on a mission to infiltrate the Emperor's train, he jumps at the chance to traverse the Great Network, to cross the galaxy in a heartbeat, to meet interesting people - and to steal their stuff. But the Great Network is a dangerous place, and Zen has no idea where his journey will take him.”

Rating: **

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Railhead by Philip Reece features on the Carnegie Award Longlist 2017, and also made the shortlist (I am trying to read the entire longlist without being made aware of which books made it through to the shortlist, so I am completely impartial).

Despite working in libraries for almost 10 years, I have never read anything by Philip Reeve. I always thought he wrote for a certain niche, fantasy with a bit of sci-fi (which I'm quite picky about) and in reading Railhead, I discovered I was correct. Had I not challenged myself to read the entire longlist, I don't know if this would be a book I had picked up. Personally, I found the blurb too vague to grab my interest and what was contained in the blurb didn't seem like my usual kind of read.

The terms and place names used seemed to me to be a mixture of Germanic and Indian in their origins. For example, terms such as k-bahn which bought to mind the u-bahn of Germany. There were words dotted throughout the book which were referred to as Old English, which I took to mean from our real-world era.

There were some interesting philosophical themes, such as what does it mean to be human? One of the robotic characters Nova knows she isn't a human but doesn't believe she is a machine either. She says she has feelings and dreams as humans do, so does that make her a human? Or just more than a machine? This is a popular concept in sci-fi books and films but may be a bit too in-depth for younger readers and perhaps too subtle for them to pick up on.

Railhead was full of interesting world building, but could have been explained in far greater detail and the historical and cultural backstory could have been a lot more forthcoming. I thought the plot picked up in part two, but for me this was too little too late. I did manage to read right up to the end, but it was a slog.

Unfortunately, not for me but loyal fans of Philip Reeve will love it, I am sure!