The Aeronaut's Windlass

Or maybe he's just a dick, I dunno. Certainly the Harry Dresden character reads like a self-insert character and he's a bit of a dick. Anyway, the ups:

Talking cats! Who save the day. And frankly they were written very well. Obviously Butcher knows and loves cats. Could have used more cat action.

Kickass ladies all over the place.

Great airship battle writing. That was fun.

An intriguing setting.

The downs:

The intriguing setting not well-explored or adequately explained. Humanity has been living in spires for at least 2,000 years, and the surface of the planet is basically uninhabitable. Full of strange, dangerous creatures that become maddened by a slight taste of human blood. OK... but why is one spire "Albion" (blegh, read the Book of Koli for why this is barf-worthy) and one spire "Aurora" and why are the clearly stand-ins for the British Empire and the Spanish Empire?

In this vein, the power sources in this book are basically magical crystals that seem to have some kind of consciousness, which means that the airships they power can be thought of as discrete sentient beings, which offers intriguing potential for exploring nonhuman awareness and suchlike things, but all that happens is that a girl learns to talk to a ship and the ship is like "My captain is so cool" and the girl is like "Yeah he is" and that's the extent of it.

A bit too long. Action needs pauses sometimes, and there was rather too much time spent with the antagonists of the story. This could have been OK if there weren't so many overlapping protagonist POV storylines interweaving throughout. Edit! Edit!

I don't FULLY regret the time I spent reading it because it was an audiobook, and the narrator did a great job, and mostly I was doing other things at the same time. But if I'd sat down and read it I'd be annoyed.

I can tell where Butcher is going with the sequels, but I'm not going to follow him there - I don't care enough about the characters.

This audiobook was given to me as a Christmas present and I haven't read any other books by Jim Butcher so I wasn't sure what to expect - but I quickly discovered I was having trouble hitting pause, and consumed the entire audiobook in barely over a weekend. (The entire book is over 21 hours so ... that's a lotta listening.)

First, the narrator they chose was fantastic - so that may be colouring this review a bit as I didn't read the test. But great work, especially voicing the cats!

And onto the book itself - nothing too deep here but a rip-roaring steampunk-and-magic story of airships, kick ass female characters, and an airship Captain so grimly serious that he's even named Grimm and extremely closely resembling Horatio Hornblower. Also sapient talking cats, so well characterized that there's no doubt in my mind that the author has lived with and loved cats for a large portion of his life.

It started a little slowly - some exposition and description of the setting was definitely necessary to explain the world, although it was fairly painlessly done as the characters were introduced. By about halfway through though, Captain Grimm and the good airship Predator are sent on a mission and the pace becomes pretty much nonstop breakneck action from there on out, moving from one crisis to another, and all the characters given their chance to shine. I liked most of the characters (not the bad guy), I enjoyed the slightly cheesy retro-British-feel of the Integrity and Honour of the Captain being Paramount, and I found the setting interesting (and the cats charming and amusing). I was, however, quite annoyed to find the end a bit of a cliffhanger, clearly another book coming to continue the story!

Bridget Tagwynn is my new (YA) hero. From the prologue, I honestly thought the book was going to be a coming of age story about Gwendolyn Lancaster -- a better entitled spoiled brat has never been written. In my eyes, she quickly became a secondary character to Bridget, Folly, and Grimm -- all of whom show more maturity and character development throughout the book.

Bridget steals the show, with a little help from Rowl. Though, if you know anything about cats, the entire story is all about Rowl. According to the book blurb, the story is supposed to be about "the grim captain" and his ship Predator, and I suppose that may become the case as the series unfolds, but this first book is definitely an introduction to the characters and war between the Spires.

To be honest, I'm picky about my steampunk and I wasn't sure what to expect from Butcher's foray into the genre. Much like Bujold, it doesn't matter which genre his books are classified into because the character development and storytelling keep you reading. There aren't too many characters nor locations to keep track of, and if you think of this as a YA book instead of one written for adults, you'll enjoy it much more.

I'm looking forward to the next book.

An interesting new world. I've enjoyed Mr. Butcher's past works and admit my first reaction being "dammit where is the next Dresden" when I saw this was coming, but having enjoyed codex alera and Dresden I had to check it out.

Does what is best, creates a world and a fun story line to introduce it with room for more. I hope the next book by him is a Dresden novel but look forward to more of these

Good read. Wasn't spectacular, but it was enjoyable. The story almost ends. What I mean is, it is obvious that it is the first of a series, but the book is complete. There's no heavy cliffhanger that is going to make you upset the next book isn't out, so I appreciated that!