"Behemoth" by Scott Westerfeld

Plot summary: The bioengineered living airship Leviathan, after escaping German land ironclads in the mountains, travels to Istanbul (not Constantinople) to deliver a gift to the Ottoman Empire so they'll stop being as mad at Britain for stealing the Erin (formerly Reşadiye) and the Agincourt (formerly Osman I (formerly Rio de Janeiro)) from them. And hopefully prevent the Ottoman Empire from siding with the Central Powers in alternate-universe-World-War-I. It doesn't work.

Our female (but pretending to be a boy so she can be in the sort-of-RAF) protagonist Deryn has developed a bit of a crush on our male protagonest Alek. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Alek still thinks she's a boy and is like "finally, someone my own age I can hang out with who won't make things weird because I'm a prince!"

Tesla's death ray also makes an appearance. Sort of. Not really. The Germans have "Tesla cannons", which are basically giant reverse lightning rods for shooting down airships with. That's not how Tesla's death ray was purported to work, but it's a neat little detail nonetheless.

Pretty much the entire book takes place in Istanbul, not Constantinople (Istanbul was Constantinople) (now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople) (been a long time gone, Constantinople) (Why did Constantinaple get the works?) (That's nobody's business but the Turks') anyway where was I? Ah yes. As you can see, whenever anyone mentioned either of those names, it set me to singing the They Might Be Giants song.

The titular "Behemoth" refers to a |giant ship-eating sea monster| that goes along with |one of the ships the British confiscated|. To be honest, that seems like |more of a Leviathan| to me, but eh, we already |used that for the title of| the last book.

I actually know quite a bit about the theft/confiscation/what-have-you of the Reşadiye/Erin and Osman I/Agincourt, thanks to my research when I was trying to write a story about them.

4 stars.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for action scenes.

(Endnote: Given the title, I thought this was going to involve |a giant dinosaur thing|.)

"The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England" by Brandon Sanderson

This book was a Christmas gift from a relative for whom I have no suitable pseudonym.

It's about a guy from |what's eventually revealed to be a sci-fi universe|, who lands in a field in medieval England (hence the title) (well, it's |actually an alternate dimension's version of medieval England|) with no memory. And, thus, no idea why he's here, what he's supposed to be doing, or who he even is.

He actually reminds me a lot of Guy from Minecraft: The Island. They're both amnesiac guys who get portal-fantasied into another world, for one. And for another, they're confident in themselves, mostly, despite not really having the competence to back up that confidence.

(They also both annoy me to varying degrees throughout the earlier parts of their respective books.)

Amnesia is a good way to avoid having to lore dump about your original world, while also being able to integrate the lore about your fantasy world in a fairly natural way. It's really a very useful plot device, especially for portal fantasy.

Our main character is not actually a wizard, though |he does have nanobot augments. And there is magic, of a sort, just not used by him|.

The "frugal" part of the title is an artifact of an earlier book concept of Sanderson's, entitled The Frugal Wizard's Guide to London, which he rejected for being "too Harry Potter". In this, "Frugal Wizard" is a brand name. Frugality really has nothing to do with the plot.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fantasy |and sci-fi| violence. I don't recall anything objectionable. It could be a pretty decent videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Personally, if I got portal-fantasied, I'd rather have a copy of the Adventurer's Guide. That in-universe book is more useful and less of a marketing brochure.)

"The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This book is manifestly okay.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against it. It's a lovely and poignant book, with a good message about how grownups should stop being boring and have some whimsy in their lives. It's not even sappy. It's just also not my cup of cake.

Basically, an aircraft pilot (who might also be a bit of a self-insert for Saint-Exupéry) crashes in a desert and meets the titular little prince. He's from another planet. (Well, it's more of an asteroid, really, and it really shouldn't have enough gravity to hold him on it, much less an atmosphere, but that's not important right now and the narrator would chastise me for paying attention to the boring fact things when the important parts are staring me in the face.)

The little prince recounts his adventure on his planet, the other planets near him, and Earth. There's poignancy in there. And that's basically the entire book.

This review is part of my ongoing quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E.

3 stars. There's nothing wrong with it, but as I said, it's not my cup of cake. Or, to put it another way, it is my cup of tea, because I have nothing against tea but I don't drink it by preference.

(Endnote: It's pronounced roughly "Ex-ooh-parry", and all French-speakers everywhere will probably be furious at me for that bit of butchered phoneticism.)

"The Legendary Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

This guy knows how to end a series.

I mean, think about it. How should a series end? In my opinion, it's as follows: the author should tie up the outstanding plot threads (but not too neatly), the villains shouldn't get away with it, and the characters should finish their quests and get closure. And that's exactly what happens.

Scarlett |finds her missing brother|. Albert |gets to visit the ruins of the evil science institute he used to be imprisoned in|. I |redact a bunch of stuff behind spoiler bars|. The bad guys, |while not entirely defeated (this is not the sort of series where one topples an entire government), have at least been roundly smacked about|.

Oh, and we also get enough hints dropped about what happened before the apocalypse to figure out that it was probably |a nuclear war but with post-nuclear sci-fi weapons|. And honestly, that's all we need to know; it would have kind of messed with the book's pacing to suddenly get a giant lore dump on the subject.

I don't like this cover as much as I like the covers of the other two. It makes them look like kids. (Which I guess is because it is a middle-grade-to-YA series, but in the book, they're both like 18.) If there were an extant cover for this book that matched those, I'd use it; however, there doesn't seem to be, or if there is I can't find it.

As it turns out, I'm a bit of a sucker for post-apocalyptic things where |the old civilization had sci-fi tech and used it in a war, destroying itself|. Like, I even wrote one (that's the basic lore behind the world of my Ward-verse videogames).

There are some new villains in this. Well, I say "new"; they're really more like new enforcers for the old villains. They wear white bowler hats and are thus somewhat ironically called the White Hats, and they're somehow preternaturally good at fighting (like, snatch-a-throwing-knife-out-of-the-air good) and tough (like, survive-|getting-telekinetically-yeeted-halfway-across-a-city| tough). Plus they're armed with |pre-apocalypse weaponry| salvaged from |a pre-apocalypse bunker complex| the villains found.

The |previous book's villain|, Mallory, also |returns in this|; this may be due to Jonathan Stroud's seeming difficulty with |killing off characters|. Thankfully, despite |Mallory's edgy-psionic-boy| status, the narrative doesn't bend over backward to |accomodate him and make him look cool; he's lost most of his telepathic and telekinetic powers| thanks to getting |roundly defeated by Albert| in the previous book, and |he's actually kind of helpless| compared to Scarlett |(who's been surviving in the wilderness for years and knows how the world works)| and Albert |(who hasn't, but he has had two whole books of character development)|.

I could probably exposit for a while about how good a writer Jonathan Stroud is. He can plot. He has a way with words, especially dialogue, especially snappy and sarcastic dialog. He subverts expectations. And -- and this is probably the most important bit -- he doesn't put inappropriate content into his books.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fight scenes and some bad language.

4 stars.

(Endnote: If I had a nickel for every time I've read a YA or YA-ish series where the villains wore bowler hats and were named after them, I'd have two nickels, one from this and one from Vega Jane. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.)

"Scarlet" by Marissa Meyer

Welcome to the Future European Union, where there are still farmers. This we know because our protagonist, Scarlet Benoit, is one of them. I honestly thought this was going to be set in Future Africa, but I was wrong.

As you may be able to guess, this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. Complete with |genetically engineered wolf-hybrid soldiers|. Our Big Bad Wolf is named, [drumroll please]... Wolf. He and Scarlet also fall in love over the course of the book, because of course they do. (This falling-in-love also comes with a side effect of Wolf stopping being evil.)

(The |wolf hybrid people| follow those discredited theories about alpha and beta and omega wolves and pack dynamics and all that. However, putting the best possible construction on this, it's possible that they follow those because |they were engineered by the moon people, who probably haven't seen an actual wolf pack in generations and so are going off those instead of any actual science. But that theory set me wondering if they howl at the moon, and if so, whether they howl at the earth or at the floor when they're on the moon|.)

I suspect our Flynn Rider character, for the next book (which I suspect is going to be a Rapunzel retelling), has shown up in this one. He's slightly insane, or possibly just very weird, and he has a space cargo ship. Well, a space-capable cargo ship, because I don't think there are any Mars or Venus colonies, and I also don't think the evil moon people want to do much trading. So really, I don't know why his cargo ship can go to space, except for plot reasons if he turns out to be Flynn Rider.

(I know Disney made up Flynn Rider for Tangled. But they made him out of the prince who's in the original story, and it's easier to say Flynn Rider than "the prince from Rapunzel".)

Oh, and also: |prison break!| Because Cinder |got thrown into jail| at the end of the last one, at |the behest of the Evil Queen|. That's where we picked up Probably Flynn Rider Guy.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence and sexual references. (There might also be some bad language in there, but I don't remember any.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: For whatever reason, I seem to have been obsessed with parentheses (these things (that are on the outside of this clump of words) that I've been using a lot) today.)

"Coraline" by Neil Gaiman

This book is creepy.

I honestly don't know what else to say about it. It's about a girl, named Coraline (not Caroline), who discovers that the bricked-up doorway in her flat actually leads to a scary mirror-world inhabited by a reality-warping monster who pretends to be Coraline's mom and wants Coraline to stay with her forever. And who, in the grand tradition of reality-warping monsters everywhere, doesn't like being told "no." There's also a cat.

Coraline is one of the better child protagonists I've seen. She acts believably like a kid, she isn't 12 (I don't think she's 12, anyway), but despite being a realistic child she's not useless.

Most children's horror books (I'm looking at you, Creepover) are... not actually that scary. At all. Coraline is an exception. It genuinely frightens me, and that doesn't happen often. I'd actually read it once before (this review is being written after a reread), and that almost makes it worse, because now you know what's coming.

(Granted, I'm not the target audience for things like Creepover. But still. It's not that scary.) 

Oh yeah. My mom reviewed this.

[EDIT, 1/13/2026: Changed the cover image so it wasn't the one from the graphic novel.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being really, really creepy, but otherwise having nothing else objectionable. That said, it would probably also be a really good horror videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This review is part of my ongoing quest.)

"The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

So you know how I reviewed The Notorious Scarlett and Browne back in February of 2024? That was actually book two of a trilogy. This is the first book.

The evil organized universalists aren't as prevalant in this; neither are the not-Mafia. The plot mostly focuses on the evil science organization (mostly evil, not a lot of science) that Albert escaped from, and their attempts to recapture him. Both the evil organized universalists and the not-Mafia are present in this one, though, and the evil science organization is still a part of the next one.

Albert is rather useless in this. I suppose someone must have a character arc. He does get better over time, though.

 

I'd actually read this before, but I never reviewed it, and I'm not sure why I didn't. Maybe I wasn't in a reviewing mood. I do know that I read it before I had my collected series posts page, which means I wouldn't have been prompted to review it by the desire to see the series all nicely lined up on there. 

Jonathan Stroud has a knack for writing snappy dialogue.

I'm not entirely sure how old these characters are, in part because they aren't either. My best guess is eighteenish.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for swearing and some violence.

4 stars. I like this one's villain better than that of TNSaB, but I like Albert better in that one. He's less useless.

(Endnote: There's also a third book, The Legendary Scarlett and Browne. It was never released with a cover that matches the covers I've used in these reviews, which is somewhat of a shame, because I like this style of cover better.)