In terms of hitting the zeitgeist and of producing a book junior fantasy fans are going to enjoy, Leviathan is a five star book. You don't need to manipulate them into wanting it. I am highly sensitive to this in books for children - perhaps too much so - but I'm also of the firm belief that if what you write is good enough and has sufficiently well-chosen ingredients, then children will want book number two. However, Leviathan doesn't quite end with a cliffhanger, but it does leave far too many questions unanswered for my liking, and I'm afraid it gives me a creeping sense of the mercenary. Junior fantasy fans are going to love this book. Alek and Deryn are great characters with sufficient conflict to maintain interest and the supporting cast is full of entertaining cameos. It's sprinkled with some vivid invented argot, which not only adds to the worldbuilding, but also acts as a rather super tactic for Not Really Swearing in a children's book. The writing is as you'd expect from this very successful writer - tight and pacy and efficient with no self-indulgence whatsoever. The worldbuilding is top notch, with spectacular machinery and fabulous Darwinist fabrications - all brought to life with wonderful Keith Thompson illustrations. From completely different backgrounds, they're forced to fight together against a surprisingly common enemy.
We have two central characters - Aleksander, son of the murdered archduke and on the run from his own Clanker people, and Deryn, a girl who disguised as boy to join the British Air Service so she could work with beasties and who's crash landed where she shouldn't.
So the war is recast as mechanics against biotech. The Darwinists (Britain) use DNA-fabricated animals. In this world, the Clanker Powers (Germany) use machines we would just about recognise today - except that lots of them have legs. Westerfeld's chosen an alternate history for Leviathan - we're in 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand has just been assassinated and Europe is on the brink of WWI. Often, the world is an alternate history past, but it can be the future too. Basically, steampunk fiction is set in a world in which steam is still the main source of power. If you're not a trainspotterish fan of the maze of sci-fi and fantasy sub-genres, you may not know what steampunk is, let alone whether or not you or your children will like it. In Leviathan, he's bringing steampunk to junior readers.
He writes a great page-turner and he has an enviable eye for a good angle on contemporary interests.
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