I wanted to like this book. The initial premise looked interesting. The writing style was kind of fun, if sparse on some details and I liked the characters to start with. Unfortunately, as I read through The Court of the Air, the things that I liked changed, twisted or were glossed over in favor of other, less interesting aspects of the story.

This vexed me more and more as the story progressed because there was one arc of the story where I enjoyed the characters, could follow their plot and it seemed somewhat removed from the snarled mess that the rest of the book became. Unfortunately I had to muddle through ten pages of slow building annoyance for every one page of the story arc I liked.

The book follows the misfortunes of Molly Templar as she flees a hit man and Oliver Brooks as he flees the government and revolutionaries within the state of Jackals. There are a few other forays into side stories (namely Captain Flare). Of the main plot threads, far more attention  paid to Oliver.

Oliver's tale is one of getting thrown into the beginnings of  a civil war, becoming an inadvertent outlaw (at first) and saving the world. The last one rings hollowly ironic by the end of the book and it really, really annoyed me. Anyway, Oliver had the misfortune of spending a great deal of time in a region called the "feymists" which frequently does things to the people who survive them (the feybreeds). Things like gaining telepathy and telekinesis.The Jackelean government doesn't want these changed people running around unless they are controlled by the worldsingers (wizards) and preferably working for the government.

In the beginning, Oliver has yet to manifest any abilities at all... in spite of being in the feymist longer than anyone on record and surviving. Bad things happen, he goes on the run and very suddenly in the middle of the book after being a rather quiet and wary person, Oliver suddenly starts spewing forth awesome-sparkly-powers-of-doom. I hate to say it but then the deus ex machina alarm kept going off, the plot became more and more of a disjointed mess and my head started to hurt from trying to figure out exactly how this or that related to Molly's storyline. For the most part it did not tie in. At all.

Captain Flare's story intersects and then becomes indecipherable from Oliver's side of events. His story is all about overthrowing the Jackelean government, freeing the feybreed from government service and helping set up a communityist (read: communist) state for other revolutionaries (his allies). As with Oliver's side of this, it barely intersected with Molly's story. What intersection there was makes a little more sense from Flare's angle and it goes towards some of the villain's grand schemes.

Now I've groused a bit about how these arcs managed to avoid intertwining with Molly's part, but how do they read on their own? They read terribly, horribly rushed to incoherence where there should have been careful attention to detail, particularly around the politics. The battle scenes are drawn out and clunky and were not where the really important events were taking place. Character motive seemed thrown in randomly and blindly in the hopes that it would make sense in the story's context (mixed luck there). Then there were tangents following characters that had little to to with, well, anything. At the beginning of the Big Climactic Battle of Apocalypse, there are these strange interludes following Damson Davenport, who never appears anywhere else, is never mentioned by anyone else in the book and really does nothing at all in the narrative that couldn't have been done following someone else. Like the villain. AS I said earlier, it was really frustrating.

Of the main branches of story, I felt that Molly's was told much, much better. The characters around her were interesting and memorable, even if they suffered a horrible splatter death two pages after you met them and even if they were somewhat underdeveloped. The villain from her aspect of the book seemed a reasonable fit for her end of the book and would have been awesomely scary... if this part of the story had been expanded upon. She discovers all sorts of interesting things as her tale progresses that play off of her modest talent and she succeeds at what she has to do to save everyone. I loved how her side to the tale ended too.

I also found the steammen to be very fun to read. For some reason, nearly all of the steammen characters were interesting to me. They thought about why they were doing things, they were fully cognizant of their limitations and short comings. I'd have to say that on the rough ride this book was, they felt very much like the ballast, steadying and doing their level best to keep the story right side up.

In short, while there were aspects of the story that I really liked which seemed cohesive, my overall feeling was that it was too fragmented and too rushed due to trying to make things way too complicated for 580 pages to contain.