The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher

The world Jim Butcher has created in The Aeronaut’s Windlass is far from the paranormally infested Chicago of his Dresden Files. This world lives in spires, suspended above Earth’s uninhabitable surface by thousands of feet, surrounded by magnificent flying ships and magical machinery. On Spire Albion, Gwendolyn, a rich heiress, informs her mother that she will join the Guards with her cousin Benedict no matter what her family says. In another place on the spire, in a different social echelon, Bridget Tagwynn faces the fact that she must join the Guards to fulfill her father’s promise, but at least she is allowed to bring her friend Rowl, a prince among cats. He will act as liaison from the cat tribes; a new and important step for the cats to allow. Captain Grimm, drummed out of the airship navy years ago on false charges of treason, flies his ship with a level of skill and excellence that can’t help but get noticed by people in power.

None of these four people know that Spire Albion is about to be attacked, or that they will be drawn together to help save it. When the rumbles of trouble begin they think it’s a threat from another Spire, but it turns out to be something much worse, something coming up from the nightmarish lands beneath them.

This is everything I love about Butcher’s books. Inventive fantasy, likeable, fully fleshed characters, gory monsters, excellent adventure and action. It of course, carries the same downsides as Butcher’s other work with the Dresden Files—he seems incapable of not amping every major situation into something so harrowing that it’s clearly impossible for anybody to survive. And yet in the end, everybody important survives. He’s kind of the anti-George R.R. Martin in that respect. (In the gore/language/sex department it is also quite clean, so I guess he’s an anti-Martin there, too.) I have to admit though, unrealistic (and slightly exhausting) as his frenetic conflict boosting is…it still makes for a fun

read.