Audio book length: 15 hrs 43 mins
Rating: 4 stars
Spoiler warning! This is book 17 in a long, ongoing series. This really isn't the place to start. In fact, this book doesn't even work on its own, so don't even think to read this review if you're not caught up. Normally, I'd recommend that you start with book 1, but the first three books of The Dresden Files are pretty bad, so you'd be better off starting with book 4, Summer Knight. I highly recommend the audio books, narrated by James Marsters. They're what finally sold me on the series.
Official book description:
Harry has faced terrible odds before. He has a long history of fighting enemies above his weight class. The Red Court of vampires. The fallen angels of the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Outsiders.
But this time it’s different. A being more powerful and dangerous on an order of magnitude beyond what the world has seen in a millennium is coming. And she’s bringing an army. The Last Titan has declared war on the city of Chicago, and has come to subjugate humanity, obliterating any who stand in her way.
Harry’s mission is simple but impossible: Save the city by killing a Titan. And the attempt will change Harry’s life, Chicago, and the mortal world forever.
In my review for Peace Talks, I mentioned that it's been six long years since Jim Butcher last published a full Dresden Files novel. This year, we got two, but only because the original manuscript got so long that Butcher decided to split the story in two. There was clearly some rewriting done to make the parts stand a bit on their own, but mostly, this feels like one of the many YA movies that they split in two (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay), where you pretty much start the second film with the very next scene and no time has passed at all. Having now read both books, I think Butcher and his editors should have done a better job of just chopping a lot of unnecessary stuff and make it all a slightly longer, cohesive story.
While Peace Talks felt like a lot of the story lagged, and far too many story strands were left hanging, this book doesn't bother much with long-winded recapping, it throws the reader straight into a massive supernatural battle, where all of Chicago is at risk and losing might mean certain doom for all of humanity. So no pressure then, Harry.
Butcher makes some choices in this book that I'm not happy about. Some of the things that happen, clearly need to happen for the story to work out in future books, and have been hinted at for a while. That doesn't mean I have to be happy about said developments, and I'm not. For all that I'm fond of action movies, and this book felt like a non-stop action extravaganza, I'm also glad that the readers got a bit more insight into characters like Mab and Marcone, and even Lara. The final chapter, where we get to see a glimpse of Molly and her family was also very nice.
Six years ago, I was absolutely hooked on this series, now I'm wondering just how long Jim Butcher is going to drag things out before I get a satisfying conclusion to Dresden's journey. This is book 17 and I'm not sure I care all that much where things are going. These books used to be an automatic pre-order for me, now, I think I'll wait until I can get them at the library, or on sale. I still like the character and the writing, mostly, but I've just emotionally moved on in the long years since when I read most of them.
Judging a book by its cover: This is a better cover than the one to Peace Talks, but it still feels very generically urban fantasy AND The Dresden Files. I suspect I like it better because you can actually see what is going on in the image.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
No comments:
Post a Comment