Start at the beginning...

Steampunk and post-apocalyptic books may have only just starting getting popular but I think Alan Moore proved that heroines with shaved heads are awesome a long time ago. Thankfully Philip Reeve is rocking all three elements with "Fever Crumb,"the prequal to his Mortal Engines Quartet. If you aren't familiar with that series it is basically a post-apocalyptic steampunk rollercoaster of adventure awesomeness. After almost total destruction of the world from nuclear war, cities roll around on giant machines to escape the natural disasters that ensue. While rolling around the cities eat each other. Seriously. Big cities devour tiny cities, bigger cities devour big cites, and so on and so on. At the same time the cities are fighting a rebel group looking to get cities to finally stay put.

Fever Crumb lives in London long before the Mortal Engines Quartet, before the cities have become mobile. She was found by an engineer named Dr. Crumb when she was a baby; because women aren't thought to be able to think rationally, the engineer raises her as an experiment. When she becomes a teenager she's apprenticed to an archeologist, Kit Solvent. He, however, is more interested in the weird memories she has and the fact that the whole city believes her to be Scriven, a mutation of the human race almost completely destroyed in riots years before, than archeology. On top of this London faces an unknown threat from the North that will end up being the key to Fever's memories, who she really is, and eventually the future of the world.

~The Stacked Librarian