"Promised much, delivered rather less. Great prose, great characters, and great premise, though one explored before in Iron Council by China Mi¨¦ville, to which this surely owes a debt (and also in a brief initial scene in Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase which has echoed around my head for 40+years). Trains are great for fiction writers: like an ocean liner or a spaceship there is movement and novelty to be described but the characters are static and contained, but unlike liners and spaceships, the train journey is also constrained by the rails. The train itself is a fascinating place, and so much goes right until everything goes (ahem) off the rails a bit. There are a couple of proxy antagonists aboard, but the real enemy is supposedly the very weirdness of the Wastelands. I won't reveal what happens, but the denouement is flat and bland, mainly because the nature of the threat is never really realised. That's kind of the point - do not fear what you don't understand - but it leaves the book flagging just when it needed to be rattling along full steam ahead. The romance element also never really works for me, and there is one scene which is very poorly planned when the Captain invites travellers from First Class to a dinner: despite the reader having seen various First Class characters, the only ones invited to this soiree are the POV characters and the Countess (who acts as a foil and whose high social status means she can say things others cannot), such that the staff attending actually equal or outnumber the guests; surely not a practical ratio for such a costly exercise on a train with limited supplies. This is an example of writer-think, when the writer wants something to happen - our POV characters to meet the Captain and other crew members to discuss the train - and simply executes it, with no thought for how it actually looks to the reader or its plausibility within-world. Normally, these things come up in your first draft and you iron them out (invite a few more guests!), but you'd hope the editor would spot this - it's like seeing the workings of the set in a film or play, and it really detracts from the immersive experience. What could have saved the book in my view would have been a greater threat from those proxy antagonists. Instead they were dealt with by a deus ex machina moment. Three stars because I liked 2/3 of the book. On the ending: just a 2."