The Guns Above Q4 Writing
How did you feel about the author's writing style? What did she do well? What was lackluster? Did you have any troubles reading it? Did it engage your mind?
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It worked for the kind of book and what I think is the intended audience. So good for that, and I enjoyed the book on that level. But as mentioned before, I'd like to see a Steampunk book with a bit more depth to the writing, but haven't yet come across this.
It was an action romp that mostly rattled along. There were some large wodges of exposition that I found myself skipping over. It didn't help that most of the detail of airship operation was just invented for the book (there not being much to draw from the real world). That meant the exposition came across as material Bennis had worked out so she was damn well going to tell us about it.
Some of the battle scenes were more concerned with the battle rather than the characters; perhaps it would have been better if the Mistral had remained on the edges of the battle? Would that have been more interesting?
My biggest critique would be how the dialogue was written, which was all rather a bit to witty and clever to come off as real. This kind of witty dialogue is really common these days, but it always takes me out of the action and puts me in the writers den when I can see the writer sniggering to themselves. It's the kind of stuff you can come up with in the comfort of your home when you have all the time in the world. It's not the stuff of daily life, and I'm quite certain not the stuff of daily military life.
I can see the attraction to witty writing in a novel like this, and I'm sure a lot of people enjoyed it. I think I've just read far to much of it over the years to find it cute anymore.
The writing kept the reader reading, so in that respect it was good. Like @Apocryphal I found it a little too much like what I think of as TV writing for my taste. Synergy I guess.