The Aeronaut's Windlass, Jim Butcher
3.7 Stars
8-1-2017

The Honorverse series by way of Jim Butcher. While this story takes place in the upper atmosphere rather than in space, it does involve many of the same thematic elements of daring and honorable ship captains, grim naval and marine fights, a prosperous and open England-type monarchy, a brutally militaristic and treacherous neighbor, arrogant and cowardly nobles, heroic midshipmen and commoners, etc. etc. Oh, and lots of intelligent cats and some magic and wizards. It works better than it has any right to, most of which I attribute to Butcher's skill at creating interesting, desperate, and prolonged fight scenes. The whole book isn't an action sequence, but most of the last half is. He also does a decent job of making characters that while not deep, are at least likeable and fun and grow on you. They all have that quality of "interesting DnD character with just enough hooks/personality to hang the stats onto and be fun to play." I also liked how for the intelligent cats, he took the personality/traits of the vampire nobles from his Dresden books, and transplanted those traits whole sale onto the cats. Again, it works better than it should.

This might well have been trolling, but I read somewhere that Jim Butcher plans to write 22 more books in this series. If so, Excelsior! Jim Butcher's audio books are god-sends while carrying out the scut work of moving/house repair. I recommend them to anyone who needs to tune out for 20 hours at a time.