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.