Cold Days by Jim Butcher

[lightreads]

Cold Days by Jim Butcher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Look, this is book fourteen, and I still don't know why I'm here. By now evidence is mounting to suggest I don't want to know why I'm here. So fine. I give up. I'll just read the damn book and stop interrogating my enjoyment of it for an explanation that might make even a little bit of sense.

I didn't like this one as much. It got a ton of shit done, but that was part of the problem. It was all A plot! B plot! C plot! D plot! B plot C plot B plot A plot! Because it had to move a whole bunch of pieces into a new configuration and it only had so many words to do it in. Ghost Story was a quieter book on the gratuitous fight scenes per page ratio, and while it's not like I really enjoy Harry Dresden when he's getting all philosophical – God save us – that book had a stronger emotional throughline, and *gestures* other analysis stuff I don't really care enough about in this context to put words to.

Which is all a silly reviewer way of saying this is a setup transition book, so yeah, it was unsatisfying. Do I care about the stuff it was setting up? Sure, why not. Though the shape of the conflict – the outermost reaches of it as revealed in this book – are so exactly identical in presentation to the conflict in his other series that it made me a bit weary even before we've gotten to the doubtless pages upon pages upon pages of Jim Butcher jizzing over just how much he loves 'defend this wall from an unbeatable hoard of millions of monsters' battle scenes. Get some new material, dude.

…Lol. Spoiler. He won't.




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Comments

[readerjane]

I get really impatient with Butcher.

But I'm still in love with Harry.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_the_firedancer]

Apart from everything else I thought this one read a lot like Jim Butcher 'addressing' the accusations of sexism and failing, badly, in such a way that it actually highlights the problems.