Sorry to hear that, Jon. For what it's worth,
three staff members at SFFWorld all read Aeronaut and loved it. Our joint review is up. I could be wrong, but the bits we liked I suspect you didn't?
And I must admit that I'm less of a fan of Brandon's work than many. I'm not a magic system kind of reader, I think. I appreciate what he does and think he's a great guy personally, but his writing usually leaves me less impressed for some reason.
/rant mode on
So I wouldn't say that. Actually after reading your review I think we largely come down on the same side for most of the aspects of this book.
I loved the world building (which some people don't like as too vestigial), loved the windlass combat (although I have real trouble with the whole idea of one ship that can take on 5 enemies and almost win), loved Rowl and the cats, loved most of the aeronauts and eventually came to really like the character of Gwyn.
My issues were probably threefold:
1) I thought he tried to have each of his main characters take on too many roles. In a world like this I like deep characters but I ended up thinking that despite the rather convoluted back story for each of them (Grimm aside), they were completely shallow. I ended up quite liking Miss Lancaster's cameo as ships engineer but apart from that none of the characters really changed my starting opinions of them - a massive failure of character development IMO. This is serious for me because I think it's Butcher's greatest strength as a writer. We're talking about a guy who is probably the second greatest influence on my own writing.
2) It takes a swing at being Tales of The Ketty Jay and comes off dramatically worse. Holy Hell. A captain with a dark, damaged past after being betrayed by the navy, POV of the ships cat, plucky female engineer..... ex lover adversary! The only thing that he added in here was a less likeable supporting cast and a love interest so bland that I found myself wishing that Benedict and the other lass (who's name I can't remember) were not in the same room. Chris Wooding probably has a decent case to sue for IP theft. I'd go as far as to say that I'd never recommend this book over Tales of the Ketty Jay to anyone....ever.
3) He broke his own magical rules. I found the crystals and etherealists to be a decent magic system, not so heavy as to be offputting (I quite like Sanderson's scientific approaches but I know that isn't for everyone) but deep enough to not be too immersion breaking. Then comes along the enemy ethereralist and she seems to be almost immune to the drawbacks of the magicraft relative to the allied ones. I hate antagonists who are set above the protagonists "just because" in the name of making the climax of the book just a little more dramatic.
I won't go into Shadows of Self but my issues with that were more down to high expectations and a certain element of predictibility.
