Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

[slowfox]

Glorious Steampunk reimagineering of The Great War!

1914, on the eve of World War I, and Archduke Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated - poisoned this time, though, and the various war machines of the European nations spring into gear. Or life.

In the red corner we have the Clunkers, with their mastery of engineering deploying massive, belegged war-machines that stride across the landscape with machine guns and cannon. In the blue corner we have the Darwinists, who engineer fighting beasts by re-combining DNA in different forms to give them the blend of beast they need.

In between, we have Alek, surviving son of the Ferdinands, trying to escape to the neutrality of Switzerland, and we also have Deryn, a Glaswegian girly trying to pass herself off as a boy so that she can elist in the Royal Air Navy.

It's a more a kids' book than YA proper, and it's a fast read. I read it in a single sitting last night, mainly because I couldn't put it down. The book also has illustrations, which help enormously, because when Westerfled talks about a 1,000 tonne walker waiting for Alek's fleeing party, you don't get much of a sense of scale.

Here's the YouTube trailer.

Downside, naturally, is that this is but the first instalment of a longer work.



Anyway, props to ms_katonic to first linking me to this!