"Paragaea: A Planetary Romance" -- give it a pass
"Paragaea: A Planetary Romance" -- Chris Roberson

I wanted to like this book, as it seemed to have a promise of big fun.  However, it was not to be, and reading it was what I'd expect reading fan-fiction to be: a thin stew of appropriated ideas and characters from professional writers.  I'm sure the author meant it to be some sort of homage to various giants of the past, but it just left me wanting to go read something by them.  Like the cover art, it was a semi-interesting sketchy rendering of cliches.

Especially irritating to me was the hand-waving and outright oversights concerning technology-- what WAS the motive power for the airships?  To see wacky transportation modes done correctly, read Jack Vance's "The Faceless Man" trilogy and his balloon tram-lines.

This gear-head sketchiness was echoed in the mere outlining given the characters.  None ever achieve more than the merest glimmering of a personality-- no, that's not right: they have plenty of personality, just no depth.  Nor width.  He's heroic: she's stoic: the cat-guy is volatile.  (I may become an author just so I can torture a few million cat-beings.)  And how come the predator chimera is scarfing down so much fruit and vegetables?  What's his teeth look like??  Feh.

Other things: in the first pages the author confuses "noisome" with "irksome", and writes something like "Now all three stages (ed: of a rocket) were firing simultaneously...." --I'm no Soviet space buff, but if all three stages of a U.S. manned spacecraft were firing simultaneously, it would be what is known as "exploding in mid-air".  Feh.

Give it a pass.