Peak must learn to navigate the extreme and exotic terrain but negotiate a code of ethics among men. To save him, his long-lost Everest-trekking dad appears with a plan for the duo to make a life in Katmandu-a smokescreen to make Peak become the youngest person in history to summit Mount Everest. 12-15)ĭare-devil mountain-climber Peak Marcello (14), decides to scale the Woolworth Building and lands in jail.

The setting begs comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki, Kenneth Oppel and Naomi Novik, but this work will stand-or fly-on its own. Two Imperial forces meet, one built with steam and the other built with DNA, producing rich, vivid descriptions of the technologies that divide a continent. The growing hostilities of what is soon to become the Great War throw the two together, and Darwinists and Clankers must work together if they all want to survive. Meanwhile, Deryn’s berth is on a massive airbeast, a genetically engineered hydrogen-breather, one of the Darwinist ships of the Allied Powers. Alek has fled home in a steam-powered Stormwalker, one of the great manned war machines of the Central Powers.

Midshipman Dylan is really Deryn, a girl passing as a boy in order to serve in the British Air Service. Alek is the son of the recently assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, hiding from European nations hostile to his father. The fate of many rests in the hands of an Austrian schoolboy and a British airman, both in disguise.

Leviathan book scott westerfeld