At the end of Leviathan, our heroes Alek and Deryn were aboard a mighty air ship heading toward Constantinople to deliver a secret package.
The only way to save themselves in a hostile, politically charged city is to offer up the thing that matters most—their air ship. In this striking futuristic rendition of an alternate past where machines are pitted against genetically modified beasts in the first world war, lines between allies and enemies blur, and the consequences are Behemoth.
A wonder world created with such imagination. Table of Contents Reading Group Guide. About The Book. Reading Group Guide. By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use. Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices.
About The Author. The British Military is not only oblivious to the fact that they have a girl masquerading as a boy, they never catch her in her many treasons.
Every time she thinks she has been caught they promote her and give her more responsibilities. Alex's life and his nation depends upon his ability to keep a secret. The phrase, he couldn't keep a secret to save his life, is so apt here, but Westerfeld lets him get by with it. I know this is a YA novel, but that does not excuse making these characters so stupid or the British Military so ignorant. Add to Cart failed. Please try again later. Add to Wish List failed.
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Behemoth By: Scott Westerfeld. Narrated by: Alan Cumming. No default payment method selected. Add payment method. Switch payment method. We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method. Pay using card ending in.
Taxes where applicable. Publisher's Summary The behemoth is the fiercest creature in the British navy. Reader reviews devilwrites. The premise : ganked from BN. The Darwinists will need it, now that they are at war with the Clanker Powers. My Rating Must Read : I will note, however, that this is a direct continuation of Leviathan , and it is not a book you can read without having read its predecessor, or you'll be a bit lost in regards to the differing sides and who's doing what and why.
So if you haven't read Leviathan , go forth and read so you can hurry to this one, because it's a lot of fun. Not only is a fast, enjoyable read, but it's filled with such wonderful little details that I can't possibly list them all, other than to say I'm thoroughly engrossed in Westerfeld's world-building, as well as his alternate history kudos for including the afterward that differentiates fact from fiction , and Deryn is simply a character to celebrate.
I look forward to the conclusion of this trilogy, and I'm wicked glad I gave this series a shot. So far, it's been more than worth it. Review style : two sections, what I liked and what I didn't, but let's be honest, there's not much I didn't like. If that's the case, do NOT click the link to my review below. Everyone else, comments and discussion are most welcome.
Excellent steampunk - really interesting twist to World War 1, with a strong female heroine. I'm really enjoying these books. I've listened to them, with Alan Cumming narrating, and he's wonderful!
Not as engaging as the first book. The first book was a constant assortment of wonders and details whereas this one takes it too much for granted that the reader gets the jist of Clunkers v Darwinists by now and strictly wants story instead of atmosphere and setting. There were far less of those "Willy Wonka opening the doors to the candy room" moments.
I would have adored more exploration of the societies Westerfeld has created in this series - instead I got a fairly run-of-the-mill heir-to-the-throne running for his life story. Don't get me wrong, I still greatly enjoyed it - it just wasn't as much of what I was hoping for. This is really my fault. It took me a long time to read this book and due to that, I didn't enjoy it as much. I got into a reading slump shortly after starting it and had to put it down I didn't enjoy this one as much as I did the first.
I still enjoyed the world though. There are new characters in the sequel that I really like and hope to learn more about in the third book.
Things don't go well for the diplomats, and Alek and Derrin find themselves on their own. Summer Wright. Absolutely love this series, and the narrator is great! I read this originally about years ago, and honestly a lot of it I couldn't understand at that point. I only remembered the basic premise, but I remembered enjoying what I did understand. Finally, I decided to check out the audio books and binged all 3 of them in 3 days.
Love all the different voices and accents, definitely helps make it very immersive. Even better than the first book in the series. Awesome YA fiction and while an alternative history, teaches more about WWI than most people would probably ever otherwise be exposed to. I'm not in as good a mood as I was in October when I read Leviathan.
This story was set on the ground more than in an airship, with more Clanker steel and diesel than steampunkesque Darwinist fabricated beasties, and so was less interesting; also I feel less forgiving of the author's cavalier attitude toward genetic interference.
Vitriolic barnacles that can breed with natural ones? The first book didn't mention interbreeding, as I recall, so the hocus-pocus planet-fuckery didn't annoy me. Also I wasn't as easily annoyed. While I don't regret the enjoyable time reading about the wacky armies Westerfeld dreamed up while the steam-powered walkers seem a sort of homage to Star Wars, the fighting ecosystems - that's what I said, ecosystems, including flying whales that host legions of shrapnel-pooping bats, six-legged dogs, fighting hawks, and more - are an imaginative reader's treat , I felt like the illustrations distracted from more than added to the story.
Though deliberately woodcut-like in style, the pictures demonstrated a very cinematic sensibility, packed with action and trying to give a sense of scale to the enormous gizmos and animals of war, and that seemed to compete with the inventiveness of the story. I'm much more of a fan of N. Wyeth and Howard Pyle, who created images capturing the tone of the stories they illustrated. While they did depict a few climactic moments, many of their illustrations simply portrayed the meeting of two sets of characters, giving clues for the reader about the unfamiliar or sometimes just plain not described costumes and landscapes of the story.
Keith Thompson, the illustrator for Behemoth, definitely had a chance to show the reader unfamiliar things and did do so, but most of the illustrations, besides being almost annoyingly numerous, depict the characters in action from a camera's eye view and with a camera's detail the full-page illustrations are so dark that the print on the reverse of the page actually ends up being lower-contrast. In the Victorian era, there was a difference between woodcut illustrations in a classic and the frontispieces of penny dreadfuls, and Thompson seems to have done the latter.
In fairness, Westerfeld didn't really help. The pacing of the book is cinematic, there is the apparently requisite unrequited teen love story dressed up for the Victorian setting by placing the girl in drag, also a tired device , and while the characters mature somewhat in this second installment of the trilogy beginning with Leviathan, they are and have always been so - so - capable.
Which brings me to my biggest problem with the entire genre of steampunk. The plot, whatever it is and it's usually about the British enlightening or conquering some 'luddites,' and that word, or some synonym thereof, is the demonized aspect of the antagonists , showcases British ingenuity, which of course has been given an enormous boost, either with advanced clockwork, inventive use of steam power or even petrol, and in Westerfeld's case DNA manipulation, and keeps a sensibility of Enlightening the Brutes.
Problem: Who paid for the gizmos? Who mined the metal, built factories or laboratories, assembled the machines, risked death in unsafe working conditions, suffered from the industrial pollutants, wheezed in the smoky air, gave up forests and bogs for fuel, moved off the farm to live in the grime of the big city, succumbed to the diseases that always follow large rural to urban migrations, bought food at the inflated prices one would expect from a deflated agricultural sector or at regular prices made possible by virtually unpaid labor in a farm colony somewhere?
Why didn't the 'luddites' or religious conservatives or social conservatives or the not insubstantial racial purist factions fight to suppress scary new sciences at home, even before the gizmos went out to fight abroad?
Were women allowed to work in the factories, thus increasing the work force without significantly increasing the wage base? If so, did the family as an economic unit change more quickly? Where are the economics? And of course it's glorious to imagine a world with accelerated technology, but did conscience accelerate too? If so, then where are the trade unions, the suffrage movements, the colonial rebellions, the public and egalitarian educational institutions?
Where are the recycling centers, the solar panels, the emissions caps? If humans tinkered with DNA, were there no consequences to the environment? I like technology. I like adventure stories. She dropped fast, hitting hard sand and loose, flat rocks that crunched and powdered under her boots. The impact shook her spine, but she stumbled along, managing to keep her feet.
The rest of the cable whipped through her safety clip, smacked her hand spitefully, then skipped across the beach toward the sunset. As the Leviathan slid away into the distance, its engine noise faded into the crash of the waves. Deryn felt her gloom descend again, along with a lonely feeling of being left behind.
Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. She sighed.
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