Steampunk...I finally read some. Really liked this alternate history with its futuristic sci-fi twists and intricate, old-fashioned-looking illustrations. I booktalked this in several classrooms and had to stop explaining how WWI started and just begin with "The Leviathan is a flying whale." 
 If you are interested, check out this video of a thylacine, which was a real animal at the time of the book (Dr. Barlow's pet, Tazza), but is now extinct. I find it totally creepy!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thy... 
 Pulled out these quotes for teen book group discussion: 
 The jolt came again, and Deryn saw a few of the tentacles around her clench, coiling like ribbons scraped between a pair of scissors. (p. 37) 
 [about bats] Survival of the meanest was one thing the boffins couldn't breed out of their creations. (p. 109) 
 Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates. (p. 119) 
 Deryn wondered how the airship must smell to the natural animals. Like a giant predator coming to gobble them up? Or some long-lost evolutionary cousin? Or did its tangle of fabricated species make them think a whole world was floating past overhead? (p. 152) 
 He remembered his father's favorite line from the poet Goethe: The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety. (p. 168) 
 [about bees] It was a typical boffin strategy - no point in creating a new system when you could borrow one already fine-tuned by evolution. (p. 192) 
 "At times eccentrics notice things that others do not." (p. 194) 
 "If you remove one element, the entire web is disrupted. An archduke and his wife are murdered, and all of Europe goes to war. A missing piece can be very bad for the puzzle, whether in the natural world, or politics, or here in the belly of an airship." (p. 195) 
 Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds among the chaos. (p. 261) 
 "But isn't it a bother?" Dylan asked. "Making a machine to do something that animals are better at?" (p. 326) 
 Even if none of it was Alek's doing, tragedies always scattered seeds of guilt in bucketfuls. (p. 381) 
 Afterword: Truth vs. fiction 
 "Barking spiders!" and other expressions (idea of writing a different world with its own language) 
 Clanker/Darwinist; boy/girl; air/sea (idea of opposites)