Grave Peril
Jan. 15th, 2015 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearGrave Peril by Jim Butcher is the third Harry Dresden novel. At the start of the audiobook, there's a brief intro by the author, explaining that fans generally feel the series really gets going with this book. Since I found the first two enjoyable, but not exactly masterpieces, I had high hopes of this one.
I did enjoy it overall - I like Harry as a character, the new supporting characters were really good (particularly Michael, the Knight of the Cross) and it clipped along at a good pace. It was really repetitive, though. There were three bad guys - the Nightmare, Bianca the vampire, and Harry's godmother - and they all popped up in turn four or five times. By the third time through the various encounters, it was all getting a bit samey and less than thrilling. Also, there seemed to be a major inconsistency - one of the big reveals from the second book was that Harry's mother had some connection to the faerie realm and suddenly in this book there's a fairy godmother whom Harry has been facing off against for many years and whom he knows is connected to him through his mother. There's no real explanation of the background to this relationship, and it felt almost as if I'd missed a book somehow where this discrepancy was detailed and the godmother character actually introduced.
Still, the relationship stuff with Susan was interesting, the vampires had some original aspects that made them more than the usual type, and I very much enjoyed Michael's conflict between familial and work duties.
I will keep listening to the series - if nothing else, James Marsters makes an excellent narrator and the over-arching backstory of the world is getting quite interesting - but I'm still not entirely convinced they're really good...
I did enjoy it overall - I like Harry as a character, the new supporting characters were really good (particularly Michael, the Knight of the Cross) and it clipped along at a good pace. It was really repetitive, though. There were three bad guys - the Nightmare, Bianca the vampire, and Harry's godmother - and they all popped up in turn four or five times. By the third time through the various encounters, it was all getting a bit samey and less than thrilling. Also, there seemed to be a major inconsistency - one of the big reveals from the second book was that Harry's mother had some connection to the faerie realm and suddenly in this book there's a fairy godmother whom Harry has been facing off against for many years and whom he knows is connected to him through his mother. There's no real explanation of the background to this relationship, and it felt almost as if I'd missed a book somehow where this discrepancy was detailed and the godmother character actually introduced.
Still, the relationship stuff with Susan was interesting, the vampires had some original aspects that made them more than the usual type, and I very much enjoyed Michael's conflict between familial and work duties.
I will keep listening to the series - if nothing else, James Marsters makes an excellent narrator and the over-arching backstory of the world is getting quite interesting - but I'm still not entirely convinced they're really good...
