But I found myself unexpectedly involved with and satisfied by the concluding handful of chapters. I was expecting a twist, but not quite the twist that was delivered, and Riordan resolved at least one conflict I expected to be dragged out through at least another novel. I was at first thinking I’d part company with Jackson after finishing this volume, but I’ve been persuaded to go a little farther.

needs more demons? kinda, but (weak start + strong finish) > (strong start + weak finish)

It’s probably one of the most religion-hostile books I’ve read in a while. The need to explain the fundamentally inexplicable event drives the creation of at least two cults (or religions, depending on your perspective) and neither are portrayed very positively. (And both have superficial, perhaps coincidental, similarities to real-world religious organizations around which there is some controversy.

I found it hard to believe that Perrotta’s characters would make some of the choices that they make. The problematic choices, for me, don’t seem consistent with what the reader has learned of the character. Maybe that’s part of Perrotta’s larger point: exploring the boundary between the rational and the irrational, between faith and fanaticism.

I certainly found it thought-provoking, and it held my attention throughout.

needs more demons? In a literal sense, demons would be altogether too easy of course. But I’m really not sure.

But jeez, I hated this book. Flat prose, lifeless characters, and a plot that was neither surprising nor internally consistent. Particularly given the allegations some of made about the real-world Dodgson’s association with Liddell, portraying a very young “Alyss” in a friendship with a romantic dimension troubled me (the more so because the plot doesn’t actually require it, since Alyss ages substantially over the course of the novel). And although I know the use of “black” as a poetic metaphor for evil is a longstanding tradition, the novel’s positioning of “White Imagination” as good and “Black Imagination” as bad bugged me a lot, too.
And I suppose it’s not really much more violent or militaristic than Star Wars, but The Looking Glass Wars‘ body count and general blood thirstiness seemed excessive a kids’ story (when this book’s Red Queen screams “off with [his/her] head!” she really means it).

needs more demons? yuck.

p.s., I should let this go, but I can’t.

“Quel est ceci?” asked the magistrate, not amused

Can one of the first-year French students please tell the class how we say “what is this?” in French? Now, let’s not always see the same hands.

I’m older than Smith’s target audience, and it may be I’m judging Smith according to standards he’s not trying to meet — maybe he’s more interested in creating a nightmarish mood than a credible plot. But there are plenty of young adult novels I don’t feel any need to make excuses for; this one feels sloppy and unimaginative compared to the YA novels I usually read.

needs more demons?

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.