Book Review: Changes by Jim Butcher

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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