Kate Lansky's Reviews > Fool Moon

A friend of mine adores this series, and sent my husband and me the entire thing. It showed up at our door in a big amazon box, and well, we got to reading. My husband is two books ahead of me, and promises me that things improve.

I dearly hope he's right.

First off, Butcher tries to pile WAY too much into this book. I hope this isn't a massive surprise, but guess what - this book is about werewolves. Now, you know how authors and movie makers, etc. will tell you "If you show the gun, you have to USE the gun"? Butcher shows about twelve guns over the course of this book, and uses them all - even ones he doesn't actually NEED to use. For instance, at one point relatively early on, he shows about 5 guns at once - now, in this case, I'd only use one or two of those - it's fine, you're establishing a world and it's cool and fun to play. But it very quickly becomes clear that Butcher isn't content with giving you a sneak peek. He has to play with all his toys in one go. It just becomes overload - so much so that at one point, Butcher has to bring the novel to a screeching halt, look at the camera, and go "okay, let's remind the readers of what all is on Dresden's plate right now. Ready for the recap?" If an author has to do this - spend ten or so pages just reminding the reader of all the loose threads still lying around - then something is seriously wrong.

On top of this, Dresden spends almost the entire book two steps from death's door. After a while, it's hard to keep the reader on the edge of their seat like this. I started just feeling like "oh look, Dresden's almost dead again. Ladeedah." Things just... lost their intensity. Not only that, but I started to feel as though the author were writing fanfic of something. Dresden lost some of the depth we saw in book 1, gained a little aura of author-worship (a 'wouldn't it be awesome to be this guy?' feel), and started to peter out in my mind. It just wasn't as good.

Oh - and while the potion workings are kind of cool (okay, I really like the potions in Butcher's world), I swear, if he makes two potions at the start of a book that just HAPPEN to be exactly what he needs later on for reasons that have NOTHING to do with why he made the damn things in the first place... I just might scream. Potion Deus-Ex-Machina is not my idea of fun times.

update - I do want to say that, having read a bunch more of the series, I do think it's worthwhile. It's fun, it's interesting, and even though Butcher might not know his way around my city, it's a solid read. I'm glad I worked my way through the rough patches and kept going.