Enemy of Entropy

Book Review: Changes by Jim Butcher

10 May 2010, 9:00 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Reading.

Changes (The Dresden Files, #12) Changes by Jim Butcher


My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars
I do not give out many 5-​​star rat­ings, but for this book I couldn’t do any­thing else. That is despite the fact that Jim Butcher did some­thing I hon­estly didn’t think he would do to his legions of loyal read­ers, some­thing that I absolutely detest. Some­thing that I will not tell you about, because I loathe spoilers.

If you know any­thing about me, though, it means a great deal to say that even though I would drop most authors who use that par­tic­u­lar tech­nique like not just hot, but rot­ten hot pota­toes, I can­not even con­sider not get­ting the next Dres­den Files book and devour­ing it the very first mil­lisec­ond I am able to do so.

My fam­ily can attest to the fact that I didn’t just laugh out loud while read­ing Changes. (Any­body who doesn’t laugh out loud at least once while read­ing the Dres­den Files should be checked for rigor mor­tis.) This time I laughed so loud and so long at one point that Sam got up and came into the room where I was to make sure that I was okay and get­ting enough air. There was absolutely no way for me to explain what was so funny, of course, with­out spoilers.

While there is a great deal of humor, there is also dark­ness. A lot of dark­ness. The blurb for the book makes that clear. Susan, the love of Harry’s life, kid­napped years ago by a Red Court vam­pire and half-​​turned in a plot to get at Dres­den, is back with big, bad news: she had a daugh­ter by him, and the child has been kid­napped by some­one. As usual, things go down­hill from there.

Many series start out with a bang, have maybe two or three strong vol­umes, then devolve into more and more and more con­tract ful­fill­ment books that I occa­sion­ally think might be writ­ten by clever shell scripts. The Dres­den Files is one of the few, beau­ti­ful excep­tions, as vol­ume twelve proves. I hon­estly thought that Butcher was wind­ing things up to move on to other projects, due to some of the events in the book, but I will say that he sur­prised the beje­sus out of me. This is def­i­nitely not a series-​​ending book!

I anx­iously await num­ber thir­teen. I might even do some­thing I’ve never done before, and pre-​​order it. Yes, Jim, you’ve got me hooked, and how.

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1 Comment »

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