A Review: Leviathan

Alright, another review.

This is one I picked up a fair while ago. Whitcoulls had overstocked themselves with this book, and were literally stacking it on the stairwells with $5 price stickers. I bought it, I read it, I regretted it. I didn't finish the sequel.

Scott Westerfeld, the book's author, was already well-known for his 'Uglies' trilogy (and the 'Specials' standalone). I enjoyed his work immensly there, and figured I'd enjoy this series just as much, if not a little moreso due to its notoriously Steampunk-y world. He's a good, reputable author, there's no denying that.

Leviathan follows Alek, prince to an empire about to be thrown into war with his father's assassination, and Deryn, a young girl desperate to join the British Air Service even though only men are allowed. So of course, Deryn pretends to be a boy.

For a male author, Westerfeld seems to have little to no knowledge of how boys act. Sure, that might be the point, given that Deryn doesn't really know how boys act either, but if her act is bad then wouldn't she be found out right away? So yes, the book started with plausibility going down the toilet for me. And holy hell was she annoying. There's nothing worse than an annoying protagonist. I don't like her motivations, I don't like her actions and I don't like her internal dialogue.

Alek, on the other hand, ruins everything. His parents are killed and he is escorted away by very capable men with a very sophisticated contingency plan, which Alek consistently ruins. Sure, his 'ruining' the plan saves everyone on Deryn's air-whale-ship-bullshit in the end but in truth the whole thing just didn't fly for me. Yes, story endings are often on the 'convenient' side, and the protagonist doing things wrong will often be proven right in the long run, but at the end of the day I simply can't get behind Alek's actions. Even if the thing he does at the end is good, up until that point all he's really done is potentially jeopardised his safety. In fact, he does exactly that at the end too, only he gets away with it so we're meant to sit there and accept that it was the right thing to do.

Criticisms of character aside, the premise of the world is an interesting one. The Allies (pre-WWI), called 'Darwinists', use genetically engineered creatures as their 'military machines' while the other side of things (Clankers) use actual machines (namely giant walkers). Westerfeld does a good job of building lots of detail into the world, giving the reader a good sense of depth to things. It's immersive, and (somewhat) plausible, so on this front the book does fairly well. I still didn't like it, but that's on me this time.

I dunno, I just find the idea of salamanders crawling through a system of tubes built inside a flying whale kinda gross. Oh and the stuff about metal deckplates on the whale's innards is gross too.

Actually the entire execution of the 'Darwinist' creatures is really really off-putting if you put a moment's thought into it...

Normally books get away with that by being so gripping that you don't get a moment to think about it, or so good that you don't care about things like that. But Scott, the characters were terrible and vastly unlikeable, what did you expect me to focus on?

The ending is 100% what you'd expect, if you assume everyone thinks like a selfless but naiive 12-year-old. It's okay.

Oh and why the hell does Deryn act like she's fucking 10? She's a 15-year-old, pretending to be a 16-year-old.

Also, no book should include the phrase 'bum-rag full of clart'.


I said in my first ever review that I wouldn't give a numerical rating. I'm sticking to that principle You might like this book, but I didn't, and I got through 'Finnegan's Wake' dammit!

A Review: Not Forgetting The Whale

This month I'll be reviewing a book I picked up, surprisingly enough, from Whitcoulls. In a last-ditch attempt to 'sell discovery' a few months back they started up something called 'Joan's Picks'. Joan is, apparently, their head buyer. The book is John Ironmonger's 'Not Forgetting The Whale'.

Previously J W Ironmonger, and not to be confused with Australian footballer John Ironmonger, John Ironmonger is known for his book 'The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder'. Said book was shortlisted for the Costa 'First Novel' Prize and The Guardian's 'Not The Booker Prize'.

Not Forgetting The Whale follows Jonas 'Joe' Haak, a stock analyst from the big city of London. Early one morning, he casts himself into the waves at St Piran in Cornwall, only to be brought back to shore by a fin whale. The combination of naked Joe and the rare whale sighting leave the town deeply stirred. Soon after his recovery, we find Joe has fled impending societal collapse, a collapse predicted by a computer simulation he programmed. He fast makes it his mission to save this quaint seaside town from the end of the world.

John Ironmonger has made my 'recipe list' with this book, joining authors like Patrick Rothfuss and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The list contains names of authors from whom I would purchase a recipe, should they ever write one, just to enjoy the prose. 'Not Forgetting The Whale' is excellently written, painting equally vivid images of smalltown St Piran and the bustling trading floors of London's financial sector, often in the same page. We care for characters that get little more than a name. We can smell the salty air of the Atlantic Ocean as we open the pages, It's like the writing Olympics, and Ironmonger took home gold and the world record with it.

The book appeals to all readers above 'children' level. There are arguably some 'adult' themes, but nothing more lewd than the mention of unmentionables. The arc of the story deals with some heavy, semi-existential subject matter, but ultimately comes out on the side of positivity. It's not like 'Requiem For A Dream' where you'll be left feeling dead inside for the rest of the week. In fact, as Joe undergoes a series of trials and tribulations to save the town, we get to watch as the people pull through time and time again, coming to the aid of first him, and then each other. If anything, the story feels almost biblical, thematically speaking.

The ending is, in a way, predictable. Foreseeable. But the satisfying thing is it's exactly the end we foresee as a reader, because we are humans and not computer programs.

I recommend this book as one of Pixie's Picks.

A Review: More Than This

This month's review will be of a wonderful book I purchased before a flight to Dunedin mid last year called 'More Than This', by Patrick Ness.

Patrick himself is known for works such as 'The Knife of Never Letting Go' and 'Monsters of Men'. He has twice won the the Carnegie Medal (in consecutive years, no less), one of which was for the aforementioned 'Monsters of Men'. He is one of seven writers to win two Carnegie Medals and one of two to have won twice in a row. Safe to say, he is a fairly well-accoladed man.

The book follows Seth Wearing, who dies.

No seriously, on page 3 he dies.

Then he wakes up, inexplicably, in the living room of his childhood home, a whole ocean away from where he died. In the center of the room is a smooth, black coffin-like pod. As the story progresses, Seth meets the girl Regine, a fellow brit of around the same age, and the boy Tomasz, a young Polish immigrant. They live in fear of a mysterious person known as 'The Driver', a black-clad humanlike figure with incredible strength and an electricised baton he uses to kill people.

I don't want to go into massive spoilers, but hot damn is the book full of twists. Throughout the story, Seth experiences flashbacks of his former life during his dreams. Through these flashbacks we start to learn about how his younger brother was beaten near to death by an escaped convict, causing his family to move to the US (hence the strangeness of waking up in the UK). We also learn about Seth's friends and school life, and his homosexual relationship with a fellow student.

The book is arguably young adult due to the age of the protagonist, but it doesn't play on the same themes as most YA fiction. In fact, the book plays more on questions that are relevant to all of us, dealing especially with existentialism. In truth, the book probably falls more in the realm of sci-fi, taking the '15 minutes into the future' approach to exploring the other.

Seth it also gay. I'm about to make a bigger deal of that than Patrick Ness did.

Actually, it was refreshing to read a book with a gay character who was more than just his homosexuality. In the same vein, it's nice to have a gay character whose prime conflict has just about nothing to do with his being gay. On top of that, his homosexuality still plays a crucial part in the plot, so the character isn't just gay for the sake of having a gay character (looking at you, Dumbledore). I may be belabouring the point a little here, but in my opinion this is the best treatment of homosexuality I've ever read.

The plot is constantly clipping along, leaving you at every turn with more questions than you think Patrick could ever answer. The use of flashbacks to tell relevant story beats from Seth's life is also surprisingly satisfying, as each time he wakes up he is left reeling from the dreams and dealing with the flashbacks just the same as the reader is. It helps us feel connected to Seth, and that strong connection is what steers us through an otherwise overwhelmingly thick plot.

The resolution ends up being the only thing it could have ever been. Still, the obviousness of it will shock you. On the whole, the book perfectly balances its YA core with broad, 'adult fiction' themes and what is arguably elements of sci-fi. It's a tricky thing to do for any writer, and in 'More Than This' Patrick Ness makes it look effortless.

11/10 with rice.

A Review: The Rithmatist

This is a new thing I'll be doing, now that I'm updating the blog more regularly. Once a month (possibly more) I'm aiming to review a book I've either just read or an older favourite of mine. I'm kicking it off with The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson.

Brandon Sanderson is the author of more things than you can shake a stick at, and I know a thing or two about stick shaking. He's a fantastic writer with such claims to fame as the Mistborn series, co-authoring the last 3 Wheel of Time books and an endless stream of ongoing series. He's like the .

Anyway, on with the review.

The Rithmatist follows a young boy named Joel, who is (as Brandon described) 'the muggle at Hogwarts'. I first heard it mentioned on an episode of Writing Excuses (Brandon's weekly podcast) in which he described it as being about a boy learning all the tricks of the trade to become a Rithmatist (magician) who had no actual magical ability.

It was well-written. I'll say that in simple terms, because I feel it's a given that Brandon's works are well-written. The first thing I noticed about it is that, compared to his other works, it reads more like a book for younger readers. It's not a children's book by any measure, but it's definitely best suited for someone on the lower side of 15. It was enjoyable to me in spite of this, possibly because I noticed the book was for a slightly younger audience and didn't lose my suspension of disbelief at the more 'young adult' parts of the book (such as when the protagonist becomes involved in a major federal case with little hesitation about his age being an issue).

One of the book's most impressive features was it's magic system. Brandon is excellent at writing magic systems, and has explained in great detail what makes a 'good' magic system in the literary sense. The joy of the magic used in The Rithmatist came from the fact that it is set in a school of magic. The students are learning these fundamentals of the system, which means you the reader are learning it in the same depth and detail as them. It added so much to the story that I understood very intimately, due to actual diagrams explaining and demonstrating the fundamentals of the magic system, how the system worked. It also made the main character, a non-Rithmatist who knew the workings of the Rithmatic arts, much more believable because in essence I had the same level of skill and knowledge as him.

The story itself deals with Joel's involvement in an investigation into a series of disappearances. It plays out like a pretty standard 'murder mystery' with its red herrings and twist-reveals, but then I'm not asking it to be the best mystery novel I've ever read. It's a fantasy novel at its core, and I'm more interested in the character himself and the way he navigates his world without having these magical powers he so craves. The fact that he's doing that in among a crime case is what makes it interesting to follow his journey. Don't get me wrong though, I enjoyed the plot of the story too, and the resolution was satisfying. It wasn't some major never-before-seen Shyamalan-esque twist but it was still good and unpredictable, and that's what matters.

I don't want to be giving the things I review a 'x/10' rating, because different books are for different people and you shouldn't have me tell you whether or not to buy a book.

If I were you, I'd buy this book.