Take Back The Skies by Lucy Saxon

Synopsis (from Goodreads)

My thanks go to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for supplying me with this e-ARC. 

Pages: 378
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Released: 5th of June 2014

Catherine Hunter is the daughter of a senior government official on the island of Anglya. She’s one of the privileged – she has luxurious clothes, plenty to eat, and is protected from the Collections which have ravaged families throughout the land. But Catherine longs to escape the confines of her life, before her dad can marry her off to a government brat and trap her forever.
So Catherine becomes Cat, pretends to be a kid escaping the Collections, and stows away on the skyship Stormdancer. As they leave Anglya behind and brave the storms that fill the skies around the islands of Tellus, Cat’s world becomes more turbulent than she could ever have imagined, and dangerous secrets unravel her old life once and for all...

What I Have To Say 

Steampunk dystopian. Just the idea made me fall in love. And I liked it. I liked the characters. They were all very well rounded and had great personality, except maybe Alice who just seemed like "the wife" the typical woman who cooks and coos over everyone like they're her children. But Cat was awesome and Fox was surly and irritable and cool even if his tragic back story was rather mundane.

In hindsight, there was quite a lot not to like, but there were only two things that I really didn't like about it whilst I was reading it. Everything else I quite enjoyed. Those things were mostly plot and setting based. The plot was... Well it was readable, and maybe it's just that I've read too many dystopians, but it only surprised me in one case, and even then, it was something that I had wondered if it might be leading too, even if I had dismissed it as unlikely.

The other thing was the technological part of the setting. They had newsports in most houses and androids for the rich, but aside from the obvious part of the plot, there wasn't so much technology involved. Even the screens just seemed to be thrown in occasionally because the author had just remembered there was meant to be technology there.

Maybe it's the sort of book that's best for people who haven't read too much dystopia. Or maybe I wasn't in the mood for it. In all it was good, as long as you don't pick it up wanting something with lots of shocking twists and turns.