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!