The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass

He is relatively controversial, but I absolutely love Jim Butcher. So... ode to Mr. Butcher first.
Every time I read a book of his, I just know it is coming from a place of genuine love for doing what he is doing, that he is writing with passion and that he will make me feel the same sort of excitement for his art. When I look at anything from him I can know for sure that I am going back to a place that will make me feel better, even if I'm having a worse phase and for that I need to be grateful, no matter what.

Now with that out of the way, I have to talk about my second time reading this book.
IT. WAS. AWESOOOOOME. Thank you. Just kidding.

Humanity was forced to live in gigantic spires, kind of like city states, using flying ships and avoiding the surface of the planet, because of some issue making in uninhabitable. Now even if they grow their food in huge vats and mostly never see the open sky, different spires still have their issues with each other, so we reach a point where our Spire Albion gets attacked by Spire Aurora, in more sneaky and evil ways than even before, so a group of merchant ship crew, young spire guards and crazy magic people have to team up as the ultimate bizarro A Team to save the word. Or spire.

Team stories are my thing, since forever, which is combined with Jim Butcher's great skills at writing different character interactions so I'm basically just a happy camper. Somehow he is just great with bouncing characters off of each other, so as long as he keeps doing it everything is all fine. Here we have yet another round of people who are incredibly lovely. Captain Grimm is serious and hardworking and troubled, Gwen is a snobbish teen girl who is growing nicer, Benedict is a fierce young guy, Bridget is my practical angel, Master Ferus is Doc Brown and more, Creedy is a pompous guy with a kind heart... I don't want any of them to die.
Special shoutout to the animal characters. Now living in a bigass tower is not particularly conductive when it comes to having animals around, but just for a moment think of the most tenacious, shitty little beasts who think they are the best of the universe. Yes, cats survived, as super intelligent, super developed, feral things with proper societies. And they are hilarious. Rowl is the best thing ever.
Now Butcher isn't a GRRM, but man, I worry about these morons constantly.

I do worry a lot because this thing has a lot of battles. Freaking aerial ship battles. For someone with zero ship knowledge (hello) these might sound mighty uninteresting as a description, but as soon as you realise that these objects don't exist and you just go with the flow... technicalities pass you buy and you have a good time. They are genuinely amazing, they would look breathtaking in a movie, which is never happening, but a girl can dream.
Now some other battles happen as well, some of them including... bug creatures.
Can we talk about Butcher's bug thing? The man loves to insert freaky nasty bug creatures in his work and it's truly nasty in an unsettling way. Which is effective when creating a threat. No complaints, they just work on me.

The book as a whole is long, though. Not saying it's unnecessary or that it's a bad thing, but everyone should know that this is a longer book, do with that what you will. Now the reason why I don't mind it at all is because the world it builds is rich and the information is spaced out in a way that is never boring, but it also doesn't bog down the flow. You always get to know the sufficient amount for the story to go on and for you to have something for you.
The concepts are ambitious for sure, but they are just to the level of being conceivable for the reader, which can be tricky.
For this reason I am glad Mr. Butcher started this series at this point of his career. With Dresden Files the thing we always say is that it needed time to warm up, a few books to TRULY catch the flow and become pure awesome instead of just freaking cool. Here we don't have this, because the guy knows what he is doing. From that point of view the more wild world building was a good choice for now.

Aaaaaand here comes my only issue, namely not knowing when the sequel is coming. The moment it's out I'm pouncing on that stuff. This is addictive, I just want more of it. I guess even it was a million pages long I would still want more.
Will I go on? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yup. (Even just last night on a forum I frequent I convinced someone to read it. I am that person.)

Good night and let this review in-spire you! (Oh, dear...)