The Aeronaut's Windlass

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!

Jim, I want to apologize in advance for this review. Still best friends?

I can't put my finger on why I didn't fall in love with this book. I liked most of the characters. I liked the plot. I didn't mind the steampunk setting. But I tried the book, and I tried the audio, and it still took me forever to get to the end.

High points: Grimm. Rowl. Folly. I adore Benedict, and I want him to fall madly in love with Bridget and run around kicking all kinds of ass in the universe. I didn't mind Gwen, although the consensus among my book-reading friends is they don't like her. I think she's fine, and she and Grimm should join forces forever and ever. No real low points, but again, the book just wasn't a smooth, fast read. I didn't tear through the pages like I do with your other books, Jim, and I can't tell you why.

Still, I enjoyed the ride, but dang, this book was a commitment. 3 stars.

I'm currently re-reading (re-listening, as I listen to the Audible version), but I hadn't written a review yet, so here it goes.

I love Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series. It is fun, it is entertaining, it is high-end fluff. And well, James Marsters...
I'm not too fond of his Codex Alera series. It was better on a re-read. A lot better, though still not later-Dresden-novels-level good.

While Dresden and Alera have different characters, I was deeply disappointed to find in this book (Aeronaut's Windlass) the same characters as in the Codex Alera. Almost exactly the same. Total cookiecutter badness.
Yes, I like some of the characters. A bit. They never get fleshed out much, apart from their Alera template. Again we have the cats/catpeople, the spiders, the warriorkind/canem. We have the benign leader who pretends to be powerless in order to lure the enemy in (although I have my theory about Abby [spoiler] I think he is a very dangerous (sane appearing) aetherealist (sp?) and is secretly not exactly the good guy[/spoiler].
We have the brave veteran/guard (Bernard/Benedict), the tough-yet-soft ship captain, the highplaced friend who probably will turn out to betray them/be someone else/have a different agenda.

Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed The Aeronaut's Windlass very much. The battlescenes are very well written and the worldbuilding is nice. I like Folly & whatshisname, I really like Rowl and the cats because they are portrayed as cats. Yeah, I'm a crazy old cat lady.
But I don't like the flatness of the characters and the fact that the story is so full of tropes, that I can finish about half of the sentences because of their stereotypical tropy predictability. That, by my book, is a baaaaaaad thing.

So, this book ranks as "sit on the beach and can't really pay attention to reading because I have kids to keep one eye on but it doesn't matter cause I already know the story and the characters". Perfect for a beach holiday, not as bookclub material.

I will read the next book when it comes out in 2017, but I won't have high hopes for it.

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.

On paper this isn't a book that I should be interested in. I don't care about steampunk airship captains. But, this is Jim Butcher and I will read anything he writes, so I trusted him and downloaded the audiobook. Then I realized that the audio was 21 hours long. I really hoped that I wasn't making a wrong decision. Turns out that I wasn't. Humans live in large towers called spires. Each one is two miles in diameter and thousands of feet high. The surface of the planet is too dangerous to go down to. There are airships that travel in the sky. All energy comes from crystals that harness etheric energy. These crystals are slowly grown in vats and are very valuable.







The Cast

Captain Grimm

He is the captain of the privateer ship Predator. He was an official in naval fleet of Spire Albon but was removed for cowardice under suspicious circumstances.

Gwendolyn Lancaster

She is the heir to House Lancaster, the family that makes the best crystals in the world. She is a spoiled brat who is overly convinced of her own importance because she's an aristocrat. She has joined the Spirearch's guards to do her few years of service. She thinks everyone should pay her due respect without her having to earn it. I pretty much hated her.


Benedict Soralyn

He is a cousin of Gwen's from a minor branch of the Lancaster house. He is an experienced guard. He is Warrior born - natural born athletes with the speed and reflexes of cats and the eyes of cats. Gwen is quite surprised to find out that he is highly thought of by everyone up to the Spirearch himself, since she never thought of him as anything but a poor relation.


Bridget Tarquin

She is the last of a formerly great house that has fallen on hard times. She is also joining the guard even though she isn't really suited for it. Can speak fluent cat.



Rawl

Prince of the Silent Paws clan of cats and friend to Bridget, whom he calls Little Mouse. He is accompanying her to the guard to try to bolster an alliance between humans and his clan. Cats are not pets and most humans see them as a form of vermin. Cats of course feel the same way about humans.



Master Ferus

He is an etherialist, a master at manipulating etheric energy. This drives a person mad after a while and he's been doing it for a long time.



Folly

She is Master Ferus' apprentice. She carries a jar of apparently dead lumen crystals and can only talk directly to her jar and not to people.When Spire Albion is attacked by a force from Spire Aurora it appears that the Spirearch's guard may be compromised. The Spirearch recruits this diverse bunch of people he trusts to get to the bottom of it - a disgraced captain, some recruits, a trusted guard, two crazy etheralists, and a cat. There is so much to love here! Any time either of the etherialists open their mouth it is completely mad. It is like trying to go on a spying mission with The Mad Hatter. They know what they mean and they are utterly brilliant but it takes other people a while to adapt to dealing with them. Rawl! There are sections of this book told from a cat's point of view. It is so well done. It is exactly what a cat would think of all this human nonsense. He knows that he is the leader of the mission. He gets angry when his person is in danger because who is going to scratch him like he likes if she gets dead? They go aboard the airship and he can't concentrate on anything until he gets to climb the "ship tree" (mast). He has a wonderful theory on telling the importance of humans by the size of their hat. At the end, he had had first aid administered by a human and was pouting about it for days. As a vet, I could totally relate to that attitude. There is a great discussion at the end about the effects of combat on a person and how hard it is to reintegrate into a society of people who haven't seen combat.It was totally worth the 21 hours of audio. I can't wait for the next installment. This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story