Akiva Reads

by Scott Westerfeld

Not bad, not bad. I could comment on the plot (pretty good, if sometimes slow) or the world-building (great!) or the excessive Holy-Armadillos-Batman! faux British cursing, but I just want to be a fan here for a moment. I have ~feelings~ about Dylan and Lilit and their queer/genderqueer subtext. (Surprise! Not.) I wish it could be a bit more text....

- Though most of the character interactions in Behemoth feel very true, not excepting Alek & Deryn's friendship, I don't buy Dylan's crush on Alek. It's more of a plot point than anything, to give Dylan a reason to struggle about whether to tell Alek she's a girl.

• I was really annoyed when it looked like Westerfeld was going to give us a played-for-laughs version of Lilit's crush on Dylan, but I should not have doubted that Lilit would be on top of things! I love that she knows before she kisses Dylan, and I love that Dylan likes it, and aaaaaah baby queers saving the world yesssssss!! It looks like that might be the end of Lilit's involvement in the series, which is very unfortunate. I hope I'm wrong. (And I hope she comes back and sweeps Dylan off her feet, but I'm not holding my breath. This is why fanfic was invented.)

• I desperately want Alek to get a bit more worldly and discover he has a crush on boy!Dylan (yes, even though I don't think Dylan's thing for him holds water), but I don't think he's there yet.

I appreciated the Jewish iron golems! We only got tiny tastes of the mythology/symbology that different cultures applied to walkers in the city, but I bet Westerfeld has a huge essay about this somewhere on his hard drive, and I would love to read it.