I liked this book. I read the first one a few years ago and found it fine, but nothing special, but so many of my friends and family adore this series that I decided to give the series a second chance.
I have a weird relationship with urban fantasy. It’s my favorite genre, but ever since I started writing it, I often can’t stand reading it. I can’t turn off my critical brain, and will tear a story apart mentally for the smallest and silliest of reasons. I was able to get past that with this novel by dint of the fact that the main character is male, which made the book different enough from what I write that I disengaged my critical brain enough to get through it.
Dresden is more physical than most female urban fantasy protagonists. I think we expect and tolerate a male protagonist endangering himself needlessly, chalking it up to heroic bravery, whereas if a woman did the same thing we’d just consider her stupid. For a book about a wizard, there’s an awful lot of guns and punching. I must have been reading a lot of books with female points of view lately, because when a female character in this book is presented as a sex object, it felt quite novel. My own female characters are rarely topless or naked.
Some of the things I really liked. I liked that there were several different kinds of werewolf. I liked that mechanical stuff tends to break down around Dresden. I liked that he had baggage around his dead parents, and baggage around an old, evil flame. I liked the idea of prepping potions for later use. I didn’t like the wisecracking spirit in the skull or the demon with the plummy accent (I’m not a fan of Christian mythology) because they felt unoriginal, though in his defense, it could be that I’ve read derivative works of this work and this is actually the originating material.
There’s a lot of action, monster-fighting, mystery and heroics in this book. There isn’t a lot of room for character development, but I guess that’s why it’s a long-running series (plenty of time to develop over several books.) All we really know about Dresden is that he’s an intriguing combination of arrogant (refuses to tell people things he thinks they aren’t wise enough to handle) and insecure (constantly rethinks and ruminates over old decisions). I didn’t immediately want to read the next book as soon as I was done with this one, but I’ll not eliminate that possibility. It was a fun book. If you like urban fantasy, you’ll probably like this one. Then again, if you like urban fantasy, this is probably one of your favorites already.
