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Title: Goliath
Author: Scott Westerfield
Genre: YA Steampunk (3 of 3)
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: As an alt-history WWI heats up, Prince Alek of Hohenberg and his secretly-female airman friend take the living airship Leviathan to America to investigate a mad scientist's weapon that could end the war.
Thoughts: Westerfield's steampunk trilogy roars to a close that continues to be delightful, but whose ending is not quite satisfactory.
All three books have been sprinkled with alternate universe versions of real people, but this one far more than the others. Cameos by Hearst, Pancho Villa, and more show how little the wildly divergent technology have impacted the apparently robust timestream. It's entertaining, trying to guess a few of the guest stars before their identities are revealed. I particularly liked the references to the cliff-hanger movie serial The Perils of Pauline, mostly because my grandmother had told me stories of watching those movies and reenacting them as a child. (Safety tip, kids--if your best friend is disabled by polio, dangling her out an attic window is not actually a good Saturday afternoon activity!...yes, the friend was fine.)
That wildly different technology continues to be creative and self-consistently thought out. The characters are still well-drawn and entertaining (although I was disappointed by the sidelining of Count Volger, who gets relatively little to do).
At the same time, I feel like some of the plot threads were never quite pulled together. I expected the perspicacious lorises to play more of a role, for example. And I felt like some of the decisions made by characters at the very end were more just ways of Westerfield getting himself out of corners he had written himself into than internally consistent decisions that the characters had been heading to all along. Alek's role in the final action sequence works brilliantly; Deryn's less so, and the actual resolution of the tension feels a bit like a cheat. The denouement felt flat.
Even so, the book is still better written than a lot of other stuff out there. The trilogy as a whole is clever and exciting. And even if the changes to history have had remarkably little impact, the changes are still fun to watch play out. I love the tech, and Alek and Deryn are both winning protagonists with competing retinues of entertaining minor characters. Well worth your time.
Author: Scott Westerfield
Genre: YA Steampunk (3 of 3)
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: As an alt-history WWI heats up, Prince Alek of Hohenberg and his secretly-female airman friend take the living airship Leviathan to America to investigate a mad scientist's weapon that could end the war.
Thoughts: Westerfield's steampunk trilogy roars to a close that continues to be delightful, but whose ending is not quite satisfactory.
All three books have been sprinkled with alternate universe versions of real people, but this one far more than the others. Cameos by Hearst, Pancho Villa, and more show how little the wildly divergent technology have impacted the apparently robust timestream. It's entertaining, trying to guess a few of the guest stars before their identities are revealed. I particularly liked the references to the cliff-hanger movie serial The Perils of Pauline, mostly because my grandmother had told me stories of watching those movies and reenacting them as a child. (Safety tip, kids--if your best friend is disabled by polio, dangling her out an attic window is not actually a good Saturday afternoon activity!...yes, the friend was fine.)
That wildly different technology continues to be creative and self-consistently thought out. The characters are still well-drawn and entertaining (although I was disappointed by the sidelining of Count Volger, who gets relatively little to do).
At the same time, I feel like some of the plot threads were never quite pulled together. I expected the perspicacious lorises to play more of a role, for example. And I felt like some of the decisions made by characters at the very end were more just ways of Westerfield getting himself out of corners he had written himself into than internally consistent decisions that the characters had been heading to all along. Alek's role in the final action sequence works brilliantly; Deryn's less so, and the actual resolution of the tension feels a bit like a cheat. The denouement felt flat.
Even so, the book is still better written than a lot of other stuff out there. The trilogy as a whole is clever and exciting. And even if the changes to history have had remarkably little impact, the changes are still fun to watch play out. I love the tech, and Alek and Deryn are both winning protagonists with competing retinues of entertaining minor characters. Well worth your time.
