Apatt's Reviews > Summer Knight

It has been two years since I read a “Dresden Files” book, Grave Peril, I enjoyed it a lot but not much of it lingered and while I intended to get back to the series, I felt there is no rush to do so. Still, these books are always fun reads, and sometimes the simple enjoyment is just what I need after a tedious day at work. Time for another wild ride with Wizard Dresden.

The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy / hardboiled detective series set mostly in modern-day Chicago, featuring cocky “consulting wizard” Harry Dresden. Each book tends to be mostly self-contained but always with connective tissues to the rest of the series. In Summer Knight Dresden is coerced by Mab, the Winter Queen of the Sidhe, into investigating the murder of a “Summer Knight”, a henchman of Aurora, the Summer Lady. The summer and the winter courts of the faeries are perpetually at war with neither side ever emerging victorious. This murder is intended to frame Mab for the murder and lead to a destabilization of the Summer vs Winter war, and an outright victory of either Court would be disastrous for the world.



The Dresden Files by by charro-art (click to embiggen).

I went into Summer Knight expecting pure entertainment and I got my money’s worth. The book does have moments of pathos but I did not really connect with the emotional side of it, I don’t feel the characters are developed with sufficient depth for me to feel strongly engaged with their plight. Harry Dresden is a likable flawed heroic P.I. you can root for, in the tradition of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He does go through extremely dangerous situations in this book, going up against weird monstrosities and super powerful faeries. The pace of the narrative never slackens but there are not enough nuances there for me to feel more than entertained. Having said that, I only required the entertainment part anyway. Though the book is mostly set in contemporary Chicago, parts of it is sent in the faeries’ domain and some very elaborate world-building goes on in these parts, I also enjoy the complex internal logic how magic functions in this book. Dresden is aided in his perilous investigations by some very colorful characters, both humans and non-human. They may not be developed in depth but they are a lot of fun.

Summer Knight is a highly enjoyable book and I will definitely get back into the series again, probably with less of a time gap next time..


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Quotes:
“It came as a shock to me. I know, that sounds stupid, but I don’t keep mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows, even doors, and it was a risk I preferred to skip entirely. I hadn’t glanced at a mirror in weeks.”

“My hair had grown out long and shaggy – not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way.”

“The elevator hadn’t ever been quite the same since a giant scorpion had torn into one of the cars and someone had thrown the elevator up to the top of its chute with a torrent of wind in order to smash the big bug against the roof. The resulting fall sent the car plummeting all the way back to the ground floor and wreaked havoc with the building in general, raising everyone’s rents.”


Harry Dresden by thegryph