July's recommendation: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross.
This is an odd recommendation, on several fronts. First of all, I've only read the first book of this series, and that's even less of a sufficient sample than usual, since (if I recall correctly) Stross' publisher ended up splitting the first book in two (due to concerns that people wouldn't fork over the cash for a hardcover that large). So the result is a rather smallish book that doesn't really end all that well, on account of it not really being the end, even of the first book.
Second, I'm not sure how much I like it.
Why, you ask, am I recommending a book I'm not sure I like? Because I think one of my major gripes against it is entirely a personal thing, and no statement on the book's quality. In a word: economics. A heavy component of the series' plot revolves around business, and for reasons reaching back into the antiquity of my childhood, I find this a rather deadening subject. Others, however, may differ -- and if there's someone else to add to the list after China Mieville and Charles Stross, I think we could pretend there's an entire microgenre of economic fantasy.
What I do like is the way Stross turns various tropes on their heads. His heroine, Miriam Beckstein, finds a locket from her unknown birth mother (found dead; no evidence as to who she was) that hauls her through into a fantasy world. It's a common enough motif, but Stross avoids the usual patterns -- starting with the fact that Miriam and other characters cross over between the two worlds on a regular basis, instead of that passage being treated as a miraculous, one-time thing. In fact, the talent of world-walking is used for economic purposes: the Clan of people with the talent on the other side (it being a heritable trait) run an import/export business, bringing luxury modern goods into their world while running some less-than-respectable trades in our world.
And that leads to the second trope-inversion: Miriam is, in fact, a long-lost scion of the Clan, and a very highly ranked one at that. But the "lost princess" idea causes more trouble for her than good, as internal Clan politics make the Medici look nice, and her sudden reappearance drops her into the societal equivalent of a shark feeding frenzy. Her modern American upbringing clashes sharply with her situation there, and so it looks -- from the small sample I've read so far -- like the series is going to be about Miriam trying to game the system both for her own benefit (and survival) and that of others.
Having said those nice things about it, I do have one more quibble, which is that I feel The Family Trade took a while to find its stride. After a hook paragraph on the first page, we get a stretch of "Miriam wakes up on Monday morning and goes to work," which leads into a plot that will probably figure back in more later, but is generally mundane and not that interesting to me. It picks up a bit as Miriam discovers the other world, but I felt it finally got going when that other world became an active part of the story. Again, this might not have felt like as much of a problem if the novel had been longer, but I was a third of the way through before I really felt engaged.
So this is one of the more lukewarm recommendations I've ever made. I do think there's some interesting stuff going on in here, though, and if you don't have anything against business or economics, you might enjoy it quite well.