Read: Un Lun Dun

China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station and creator of the new weird world of Bas Lag, enters the Young Adult market with Un Lun Dun. The titular city is the fantasy flipside of London, a conceit that seems to be popular with British authors these days, and with readers around the world. The consensus seems to be that London isn't really all that interesting without magical modes of transportation involved, ideally in the form of trains or buses.

To its credit, Un Lun Dun is also inhabited by the Unbrellissimo, a character who travels by floating unbrellas, swinging from one handle to the next to get to where he wants to go. And though the book starts off in typical form, with the chosen one, Zanna, and her sidekick Deeba whisked away to Un Lun Dun, where they meet various cleverly named creatures and run away from the forces of evil, events take an unusual turn 100 pages in. The bad guys trick the Propheseers into believing everything is taken care of and arrange to send Zanna and Deeba back to London, leaving Zanna with no memory of the experience.

Deeba's curiosity and Google-fu allow her to discover the deciet. She takes it upon herself to return to Un Lun Dun, eventually becoming the Unchosen One, much to the resentment of the Book that contained all the prophesies. ("Maybe in a few years we'll open me up and read what was supposed to happen and we can all have a good laugh.")

Stripped of his usual vocabulary, the vitality of Un Lun Dun doesn't compare to Mieville's Bas Lag, but it's also less intimidating. Though the setting seems haphazardly defined, given the 400-page length of the novel, the story has more depth than the stereotypical Young Adult fantasy. Like many books marketed as YA, it's more of a children's novel than one specifically aimed at teens. The protagonist's age and race are undefined, she's rarely wrong, and the possibility of failure is never present. It even has illustrations that, at least in the US version, give away what's going to happen before the reader gets to that paragraph.

In a true YA series, say, Harry Potter, the main characters continually learn the harsh lesson that they don't know everything. They screw things up. In Un Lun Dun, the city existed for centuries before Deeba came along, but no one ever considered: "The Unbrellissimo controls all broken unbrellas. What happens if you repair one?"

But Un Lun Dun is an excellent children's book. The cliffhanger ending is a disappointment, but it offers hope that this might be the second coming of Oz. With any luck, a year from now you'll be reading Hong Gone.