Exactly how you'd imagine a magical London YA novel by China Mieville to turn out: appropriately wonderful weird worldbuilding, good enough story arc. Above average amount of painful puns. Plus, and this is something you might not think, actually suited for kids. I wasn't sure Mieville would reign in his weirder tendencies.

I think The Iron Council was weaker than The Scar (which is the previous volume in the Bas-Lag/New Crobuzon trilogy), but I enjoyed it nearly as much, because I'm a sucker for revolutions. Also, it's noticeable just how skilled China Miéville is at talking about cities – each of the stories in the series describes at least one fundamentally foreign, weird city with a mix of cultures and races among the inhabitants, and thanks to the sublte worldbuilding and depth, I feel invested and interested in every one of them.

The Scar is the second volume of Chine Miéville's Bas-Lag series, and it's as impressive as the first one. Only very loosely connected, we now explore the wider Bas-Lag world instead of New Crobuzon. Again, China Miéville excells with implicit worldbuilding, forcing the reader to think along and ahead (though there's less culture shock included than in Perdido Street Station).

Wow, this book was … a lot to take in. I liked it very much. Getting thrown into an Ankh-Morporkesque city, discovering alien races, and characters, and social structures was awesome. I noted with thanks that there was very little of a conventional story arch, so that the overall direction of the story only grew really clear when reaching 50-65% of the story. The very clear-cut and very different characters were relatable and realistic, and the final twists were all the better for the fact that they were not positive.

Young child discovers the world – his occasionally psychopathic father, his practical but proud mother, and the little town at the foot of the mountain. Everything is both creepy and boring – a uniquely kafkaesque mix (and the end is straight up like a Kafka short story that I can point at).

The City & the City is a very impressive scifi book, but while I can appreciate its coolness and weirdness, and I can't point to a single flaw, somehow the story didn't quite grip me, although the concept of the two cities was introduced beautifully.