Barking spiders!
Dear Internet:
I do hope you have been comporting yourself well in my absence, as I have disappeared beneath scholarly tomes of various levels of interest and engagement. Things seem to be going fine but one can never tell, thus, the occasional check-in.
My purpose in writing is to inform you of a series of novels that may pique your interest, and that you should go out and acquire RIGHT NOW because they are SO AWESOME that they are causing me to break the fabulously formal tone I had going for all of two sentences. But seriously - if you are interested in cheeky cross-dressing Scottish girls, aeronautical (and other) escapades, alternate history, political shenanigans, introspective princes of the royal line of Austria-Hungary, and/or something like steampunk but actually more awesome - you NEED to read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. And then you need to read Behemoth and then you need to read Goliath and then you need to tell me all about it so that we can fangirl over HOW BARKING AWESOME they are.
I read the first two books in August, having had Leviathan on my list for a long time but never gotten around to it (don't ask me how not!) and when the third book in the trilogy was released I got it delivered the day it came out and read it in six hours, basically only breaking to deal with bodily imperatives. I spent most of that reading making incoherent noises of commingled anguish and glee. It is so worth it, as a series and as an imaginative universe in which to play.
Deryn Sharp - aforementioned cross-dressing Scottish girl - grew up flying in hot air balloons with her dad, and even his death in a freak ballooning accident can't keep her from wanting to get back into the sky. At fifteen, she takes the last of her inheritance and heads from Glasgow to London, where "Dylan Sharp" is born and gets a job as a midshipman on board His Majesty's Airship, the Leviathan. The prince of Austria-Hungary would be Aleksander, (fictional) son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who is forced to run away when his parents are assassinated. Through a series of complicated events, Alek and his men wind up as passengers on the Leviathan, and the story develops onwards and upwards from there.
Westerfeld has reimagined the Allied/Central powers divide along technological lines: the Allies are known as the "Darwinists" because of their advanced biological sciences and genetic manipulation, which they use to create living ships and weapons systems (ex. the Leviathan is basically a massive hydrogen-breathing whale-like creature, with a whole ecosystem of other genetically manipulated animals living on and in it); the Central powers are called "Clankers" because they tend towards machine-based technology, but even their machines are more animal-like than our modern ones...think "walkers" and things that move on legs more often than on wheels. The alternative histories and technologies are fascinatingly intricate, but they never intrude upon the centrality of the story at the heart of the trilogy, in which two kids from different backgrounds leading totally different lives become fast friends and change the course of human history in the process.
Maybe I like it so much because that whole "two kids who become fast friends and change the world in the process" bit is also applicable to a lot of Young Wizards, but I don't think that's all of it. The writing is very honest about Deryn and Alek's struggles as fifteen-year-olds in the midst of a completely shifting world order - they are awkward and uncomfortable and unpredictable and energetic and hilarious - but it also never signals them out as somehow less deserving of anything due to their age. Part of this is accomplished by the fact that "there's a war on" and thus all people are expected to chip in, but no one ever tells Deryn and Alek that, since they're "just kids," what they're doing somehow "doesn't count." They are brave, and their bravery is recognized.
Of course, also, Deryn just smashes gender binaries left and right and is SO AWESOME doing it. Reading the books I came to the conclusion that I may have more in common personally with Alek, or at least that I don't know if I could or would do all that Deryn does, but damn, I wish I had it in me. I hope my daughter(s) do(es) - and/or my son(s)!
I actually just reactivated my Audible account for the sole purpose of downloading the Leviathan audiobook (of course I did this right before my iPod decided to die on me, but hey, that's life), and although it lacks the pictures that made reading the physical books so pleasurable (did I mention there are pictures??), I cannot complain about it at all because it is delivered WITH ACCENTS and I am in love. Again. Still.
Moral of the story: Read these books, because goodness knows that I will still be reading them and talking about them and what happens after them for a good time to come.