For those that don't know, I'm a huge fan of Scott Westerfield's Leviathan Series. The new book, Goliath, comes out today and I can hardly wait to see what happens to Deryn and Alek.
It's been called "steampunk" but that hardly does it justice. The separation of the WWI powers into Clankers and Darwinists is pure genius, and if you don't know that that means, you need to read the books.
Behemoth is a fun adventure tale set in Istanbul, but I have to say that Leviathan is one of my all time favorite books. It has a very simple yet powerful narrative structure. The chapters alternate between the stories of two very compelling characters, Deryn Sharp, a young girl disguised as a boy, determined to make it in a man's world as a midshipman aboard a flying whale...yes you read that right, and Alek, heir to the Hapsburg empire caught in a conspiracy to kill him and his family and thus start WWI.
For the whole first book, you know these two are going to come together by the end. Their meeting is inevitable and yet thrilling despite knowing about it advance. The ability of the author to foreshadow their eventual meeting to the reader, and yet still make it thrilling and exciting when you arrive is just amazing. The end is not in doubt, only the details, and you read for the details which are amazing.
I strongly endorse the work.
As I was framing my own book, I wanted it to have that same urgency and inevitability. I wanted the readers to know from the first pages that my two main characters, Lucy and Nephys, were going to collide by the end of the book, but how they got there, I wanted to leave as a bit of a mystery.
If I managed to capture half of the tension and excitement of Leviathan, than I know I will be a success.
Stop reading and go buy Westerfield's Leviathan series now.
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