GOLIATH by Scott Westerfeld

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was chatting with Scott about the forthcoming UK publication of Behemoth, the second in the Leviathan trilogy, and now we have Goliath, the third and final book. My, a year goes by quickly! And in that time, Scott and his illustrator Keith Thompson have, most definitely, produced another masterpiece.

 

I would have got round to reading Goliath a bit sooner but I had an umpteenth redraft to finish and so this book sort of burnt its way into my head. It meant that I polished off the redraft really quickly, popped it in a drawer and then, eureka, I could get onto Goliath. Only, of course, then, I didn't actually have anything else I really needed to do and that led to me reading a couple of hundred pages before I knew it. So I forced myself to slow down, because, frankly, you don't want to read this too quickly and sweep past the exquisite little niceties of the plot and the superbly intricate illustrations.

Goliath finds Alek and Dylan back on board the Leviathan and off to pick up Nikola Tesla, a Russian inventor who has created a machine, Goliath, which he claims can destroy half the world but which he wants to use as a threat to stop the war. Now, if you haven't read the two earlier books in this trilogy (Leviathan and Behemoth), you won't have made much sense of that. So let me direct you to my reviews of those books and my interview with Scott, which, at the very least, might explain the steampunk alternative world in which this story is set.

As, I guess, we've all hoped for a while now, Alek finally discovers that Dylan is a girl. This isn't a spoiler. Anyone could realise it would happen soon enough, and anyway, it's not the fact of the discovery which is interesting so much as the way it happens, in particular the exquisite little hints given by Alek's deliciously named perspicacious loris, Bovril. Indeed, one of the more delightful aspects of this book is the role played by the lorises and the irony that meets their increasingly perspicacious comments. This could be really grown up stuff, but my perception is that it wouldn't pass over the head of an intelligent 12 year old and it will certainly introduce them to a very useful new word! Of course, once Alek has made his discovery, all manner of emotions ensue: confusion, anger and resentment at what he sees as a betrayal, mourning for a lost friendship, acceptance and, well, I wouldn't want to reveal the ending but if you've read the rest of the books you can probably guess it. 

And all the while, the events unfolding around Alek and Dylan are becoming increasingly complex and threatening. In Leviathan, Westerfeld kept relatively close to First World War history. In Behemoth, events in the book started to part company with the historical record and in Goliath they part company pretty completely. Many of the characters are real historical people: Tesla, himself of course, but also William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Philip Francis and Francisco 'Pancho' Villa. Some are well know, others less so, and Westerfeld provides us with a neat little adendum at the end of the book which gives us brief bios of these characters and outlines where the book parts with reality. But had the real war followed the course here, many thousands of young men would not have died in the mud of Normandy.

Which leaves me to talk about the illustrations, because the strength of this series is as much in the illustrations as the writing and for me nothing sums up their power as the one entitled 'The Walker Shoots Deryn'. This single page sets the harsh intricacies of the Clanker walker against the almost lyrical sinuousness of Deryn's 'wings'; one a heavily shaded, metallic structure with detailed irregular shaped knobbly extrusions, the other depicted more by white space than line, and drawn with a sweeping light touch that makes the wings seem to shimmer against the background. I'd love to be able to share a copy of this with you, but I don't have that authority. So you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that one page is quite simply masterful.

So, this is the end of the trilogy. I can't imagine what Westerfeld will come up with next. I just hope that this isn't the last we've seen of his collaboration with Keith Thompson.

The lovely folk at Simon & Schuster sent me this review copy. If you want to get one for yourself pleae buy it via the link below and Amazon will make a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.

The Truth About Celia Frost by Paula Rawsthorne

I was in WH Smith the other day, browsing around the YA titles looking for something to add to an adult choice I'd already made that would bring me over £15 and let me use the £5 voucher I had and I noticed this:

And, of course, I had to buy it.

Now I've know about Paula Rawsthorne ever since the 2010 SCBWI Undiscovered Voices competition results were announced. Paula was one of the winners. (She was interviewed about the experience here.) Less than two years on, her debut novel, The Truth About Celia Frost is available, which, I guess, is what that competition is all about. And watch this space because the 2012 results will be announced soon and who knows what more literary goodies that might bring.

But back to Celia Frost. This is what the blurb on the back says:

Celia Frost is a freak. At least that's what everyone thinks. Her life is ruled by a rare disorder that means she could bleed to death from the slightest cut, confining her to a gloomy bubble of "safety". Nor friends. No fun. No life.

But when a knife attack on Celia has unexpected consequences, her mum reacts strangely - and suddenly they're on the run. Why is her mum so scared? Someone out there knows. And when they find Celia, she's going to wish the truth was a lie...

This is a fast-paced read which you can trip through at a fare old lick. I bought it on the way up to London for the Agents Party and read it both there and back again. And I can honestly say that for once I was sorry when the train arrived at my station and I had to stop reading about 170 pages in! By then I'd been skillfully lead up the garden path by Paula's writing, and was even priding myself on how smart I'd been by working it all out. I was pretty sure I knew how it would end, although there were a few tiny niggles that clearly needed to be resolved. So I was keen to read on to find out what Paula would do about them. Well. I got it all wrong and the niggles proved to be rather more important than I'd dreamed!

All of that might seem a bit unspecific as to the plot.  So let me see if I can be more helpful.  The book opens with Celia at school. We quickly pick up that this is one of many schools she has attended and that here, as always, she will be systematically shunned by everyone because of her strange disease. She will also be bullied. But she is a strong character and she is clearly starting to want to break out of her 'victim' status. So she faces up to the bully and the story really begins.

There is a fight. She is cut. Her body reacts unexpectedly. And enter Janice, the mum: neurotic, almost hysterical and we start to wonder whether she might be the one who is sick rather than her daughter. Janice sweeps Celia out of the hospital and they run away pitching up on a grim, gang-infested estate on the outskirts of a city. Here Celia comes face to face with more violence and meets Sol, the undersized youngest son of an Ethiopian refugee mother. Sol helps Celia start to live a normal life and in so doing initiates the disintegration of the tissue of lies that Janice has woven around Celia since she was a small child.

There's plenty of gritty reality to get your teeth into here. Sol's older brothers teeter on the brink of illegal behaviour. The private detective who has been hired by the mysterious Nemo to find Celia and her mother, has definitely overstepped the bounds. And the estate where both Sol and Celia live is riddled with gangs. And then there is the matter of the 'Truth'. I can't reveal it here, clearly, but suffice it to say that it leaves you thinking about society and ethics much in the same was as does Neal Shusterman's Unwind, although without quite so much shudder factor.

This is a great book for kids of both gender who want a fast paced book that will ask them to think a bit about some of the big issues facing us and them but never preaches or patronises. It's a superb debut novel and leaves me wondering what Paula might come up with next.

If you want your own copy please order via the link below and Amazon will make a small contribution to maintaining this blog.