30 Mar 2015
As you can see, this is also a Jim Butcher book like the Dresden files, so I had extremely high hopes. The Dresden books are what set me on this venture to read through similar authors. I like the obnoxious wit and sarcasm in the Dresden books, so I expected to find more of that here, even if the setting was different. I did not find nearly as much to laugh about in this book and it was not as alluring as Butcher's Dresden books.
All that being said, it was a reasonably good book for the first of a series. My interest in the book was clouded with hopes of being as great as a Dresden book, and I was fully aware of that from the beginning. Butcher's Furies series doesn't have the fervent following that his Dresden series dose, and I know why.
The book, standing alone without expectations, is fine. Not the best one I've read, FAR from the worst. He, again, keeps up a good pace and has created an interesting enough world. Some characters were a little too obvious, some too opaque. The characters' reactions were all within reason, but some only barely.
My biggest issue was with the wildlings called Marat. He goes into description of them and their culture but never says what they are. He uses "man" and "he" and "woman" so on during action sequences and they have male and female, but I wasn't even sure if "man" was the right word. Are they a non-human primates? Something farther away on the evolutionary chain than Neanderthals from us? Are they magical, non-real beings? Are they people who's ancestors fell into a vat of toxic goo? I had a hard time coming to terms with them because Butcher skips over what they actually are.
I would read more of this series, but it's pretty far down on my list. I'd much rather read more Richard Kadrey, Stephen King, or Phillipa Gregory first. It also wouldn't be first on my list of recommendations to anyone unless they had already read everything else I could offer.
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