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Great worldbuilding, "romantic" plot tumor

Revisado: 05-07-21

I wanted to love this. So many of the elements are great, from the suave former hunter turned vampire to the friendly tribe of heavy metal loving orcs to the old Jewish ghost helping the next generation of heroes kill nazis... the descriptions of firearms might sometimes slip past 'loving' into 'fetishistic' but that never really becomes a problem and it's refreshing to have a story with a lot of modern weaponry written by somebody who actually knows their stuff. And the core of the story is solid, a classic tale of petty mortals facing an unknowable, unbeatable enemy and doing everything they can to delay the apocalypse, full of clever tricks by the villains and prophecies that make perfect sense in retrospect while avoiding being obvious until the moment before they're fulfilled and all that good stuff. But through the whole thing, there's this "romance". By which I mean our hero meets a girl, decides that they're destined to be together, ignores the fact that she already has a boyfriend, and continues to crudely proposition her no matter how many times she bluntly refuses him. Finally he decides to assert his masculinity by punching the man she loves in the face and throwing him in shark-infested waters... and somehow this makes her fall madly in love with him? And then when her boyfriend is kidnapped by dark forces, set up to be used as a sacrifice (which, just to be clear, would not work if the boyfriend were not a genuinely good and heroic person), it takes her all of ten minutes to decide this is a good time to have sex with the new guy. And not a single character in the entire book seems to think there's anything remotely wrong with this, with people whose faith is so powerful it can burn the wicked and every surviving member of the lady's family cheering him on. Maybe I could excuse this if the book would just admit that it was about a sleazeball or a pervert, some kind of byronic antihero. But over and over it's made a major plot point that Owen is incredibly strong-willed and incorruptible. Maybe I could ignore it, just skip past these parts, except that their relationship becomes more and more central to the plot as we near the end, and the Power of Love is a major element in the final battle for the fate of the world. So when I should be enjoying the adventure, instead I'm being forced to confront the fact that the author seems to genuinely think that a woman's consent and choices are largely irrelevant, that the good and noble course of action for a man is to take whatever he wants from those around him without any regard for the consequences or their feelings, so long as he personally is "in love".

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A fairly smart story with a few stupid additions

Revisado: 04-08-16

Overall, this is a story with an intriguing premise, many deep and realistic characters, intelligent obstacles and clever solutions... even the pseudoscience is plausible. The writing is far from the best I've seen; I wasn't hanging on every word or falling in love with the characters like with the truly magnificent books, but it was decent all the way through without any serious annoyances.

My first impulse is to give this a solid 4/5 and recommend it to friends. However I've removed one star, and will be hesitant to talk about this book with others, on account of the author's decision to include several chapters describing in great detail the activities of a brutal serial rapist and one of his victims. Activities which, I might add, turned out to be utterly and completely irrelevant to the plot of the story or the lives of any of the major characters.

A quick skim of other reviews indicates that the sequels contain more and worse. I don't think that the story value is sufficient to convince me to endure that, so despite my curiosity as to what comes next I will not be purchasing the other books in the series, or anything else by this author.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Glad I didn't pay full price

Revisado: 03-21-16

Got the book on sale after having been intrigued by the concept but too busy to read it for a while, and regretted my purchase almost immediately. The first couple chapters alone display a remarkable lack of understanding of mental illness, medical institutions, how stab wounds work, and basic personal interactions, and that first impression was not improved on through any of the parts I managed to slog through. The titular assassin is presented as a brilliant and fearsome killer, but seems to mostly only function because the world around her bends over backwards to make her self-absorbed bumbling lead to a beneficial result. The narration has a bad case of 'have I mentioned that I'm an assassin today?', not to mention the shallow, offensive stereotypes used instead of writing background characters. The world and magic system are intriguing, and the underlying concept remains cool, but not enough to keep me reading through the everything else.

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Jim Butcher figures out beginnings

Revisado: 02-20-16

Mr. Butcher has written some great stories over the years; both the Dresden Files and the Codex Alera will be loved and praised for many years to come. But it is also generally accepted that the first book of Harry Dresden's adventures is dramatically lower quality than those following, and reading Furies of Calderon nearly convinced me not to pick up a second volume, which would have been a terrible loss.

I dearly hope that the trend continues, because if The Aeronaut's Windlass turns out to be the worst book of the Cinder Spires, the rest of the series must be simply incredible.

The world is vibrant and imaginative, with huge amounts of information relayed without ever feeling like the flow of things is broken by excessive exposition, and leaves many questions left for future exploration without being frustrating or arbitrarily denying the reader information. The characters are not only interesting, but they all feel *human* (except of course for the ones who are not), rather than like flat plot devices. I found myself loving or hating even very minor characters from brief interactions. As for the story and tone and such, all I will say is that I never found myself disappointed by either the author's decisions or the execution of them, and that is a thing I can very nearly never say.

I eagerly await the next volume.

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