Leviathan opens with the assassination of the Serbian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that precipitated the first world war in our universe, and threatens to do so in Westerfeld’s alternate history. But in Westerfeld’s timeline, some technologies are much more advanced in 1914. Europe is split between the Darwinists, whose array of fantastic genetically engineered creatures include living airships, and the Clankers, who shun biotech in favor of walking tanks and legged land battleships — like steampunk versions of Star Wars’s walkers.

Despite my longstanding eagerness, I approached Leviathan with slight trepidation. I was worried it would be too militaristic. It wasn’t — there are battle scenes, but the principal characters are working to avert or contain the war, which for me is a crucial attitudinal difference. It’s also written for a younger audience than Westerfeld’s other books (12 and up, according to Simon Pulse). I was slightly embarrassed to be devouring an illustrated “chapter book” at a brainy event like a Lorrie Moore reading — but that didn’t stop me. Westerfeld’s characters — a Clanker princeling and a Scots girl passing as a young airman in the British air navy — are as engaging as in his other books, and the plot is tightly paced and exciting. And Keith Thompson’s illustrations are pretty cool.

What really knocks me out about this one is the world-building. Westerfeld’s alternate history is strange and compelling. For my taste, the artificial ecologies upstage the mechanical constructs. Westerfeld laces them with some mostly credible chemical underpinnings, so there’s even some potential educational value (although the reader might come away with the mistaken belief that undiluted hydrogen has an odor in our universe).

Like my favorites of Westerfeld’s books, Leviathan has a slightly subversive side — he clearly feels no compunction to give equal time to “intelligent design.” The novel is pro-evolution enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it banned from some school libraries.

One drawback: it doesn’t end with a literal cliff-hanger, but it’s not entirely satisfying as a stand-alone novel. I sure hope I don’t have to wait three years for the next one.

needs more demons? no.

Liar is darker than the other books. Micah is a compulsive liar, and the novel fundamentally revolves around the question of just how unreliable a narrator she is. The text clearly supports different interpretations of what “really” happened, and which — or if any — of Micah’s sometimes contradictory accounts are “true.” The novel’s structure is complex — it consists of short chapters, most simply headed “before” and “after” to identify their chronological relationship to a significant event.

There are two traps a book like this needs to avoid — one is when peeling back a layer of lies reveals something that strains the reader’s credibility or violates the book’s internal logic. The other is when the narrator’s unreliability passes a threshold beyond which the reader loses interest in what is “true” or “not true.”

For me, Liar danced right up to these lines — repeatedly — but never quite crossed either one. Micah remained a sympathetic (if damaged) character, and I stayed involved in the book. I could scarcely put it down, in fact.

needs more demons? adding demons would absolutely ruin this book.

In an author’s afterword which is perhaps a little too forthcoming, James acknowledges Shakespeare in Love as a major inspiration. Like that film, The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen invents life situations for Austen which can be reflected in her art, but the novel is also concerns the tortuous progress of Austen’s novels towards publication. Sometimes this becomes gimmicky, as when characters suggest revisions or even title changes to Austen’s drafts, but the portrayal of Austen’s joy in her work is one of the books’ highlights.

Despite James’ claim that she steeped herself in Austen during the writing of the book, and the inclusion of some paraphrases from Austen’s work and correspondence, James’s prose is mostly (sometimes jarringly) modern, and I found it a very quick, diverting read. The romance that James designs for Austen is quite nicely constructed: although it has echoes of Austen’s most famous works, it doesn’t nakedly recapitulate any one of them.

needs more demons? tempting as it is to imagine Austen as a demon-hunter*, not really

*author Stephanie Barron managed a series in which Austen’s presumed-lost correspondence to Cassandra revealed her to be an amateur sleuth, so perhaps anything is possible.