Storm Front // Jim Butcher

I don’t think Connecticut knows how to spring -- which, hey, I’m not complaining that it warmed up so fast. After an extremely snowy winter, we had about a month of foggy, chilly ~20 degree weather, then one day hit 70, then another week of ~20, and suddenly early summer. One of my professors back in college said she’d never understood spring until she experienced it in England, where apparently the seasons don’t flip overnight. This is how you know I’m from Connecticut : talking about the weather is practically our national pastime.  

Why I'm reading
I watched a few episodes of the TV show, and it was pretty good.

Where I got the book
ebook from Greenwich Library, using the Overdrive app. Berlin-Peck lists both collections of the Dresden series, but weirdly enough the first set is “unavailable” -- not borrowed, just unavailable.

Expectations
Honestly? John Constantine.

So how was it?

I couldn’t finish this. I just couldn’t. I got a few chapters in, and gave up. Maybe if it was a short story I could have persevered, but even then, it didn’t have the infuriating unintentional humor of subatomic dinosaurs.

Harry Dresden is a wizard private eye -- yes, you read that right, he’s a wizard named Harry, in a book published three years after the first Harry Potter -- in a world run by shadowy wizard councils, mafia bosses, and good-cop bad-cop tough-but-also-somehow-feminine-hot-female-cop / annoying-ugly-skeptic-male-cop duos. Sounds pretty interesting, right? But the writing was just excruciating.

I can 110% understand how this would make an engaging TV show, because -- unless some very strange choices are made -- a TV scifi hero isn’t going to spend the entire first episode monologuing about himself as things happen in the background. Since the problem is bad characterization, even a minimally engaging lead actor could make the series actually interesting.

And yeah, a lot of long series take a while to get better -- to grow their beard, as it were. I have no doubt that the later books are better… but better than this still isn’t worth it for me.

Recommendation
I just can’t recommend this, but hey, I guess it works for a lot of people. If you’re looking for a quirky, noir, slightly humorous, slightly sci-fi, down-on-his-luck private detective that’s actually well written, check out Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently.

Feels
Self-involved. Lame. Unbearably, ignorantly, "look at the gams on that, uh... bossy strong female character who won't sleep with me" sexist. If a book can dwell on itself, that’s what it seems to be doing.

Favorites
I can't even.

Least favorites
He’s a pretty big Marty Stu, and a little bit neckbeardy, to be honest. Opening doors for women, with a couple of paragraphs explaining his old-fashioned philosophy, and dropping off-hand comments to the reader about all his Dangerous Wizarding Powers. He’s a super powerful, super impressive wizard -- we know this because he tells us, not because of context clues, or characterization, or even seeing him use his awesome powers. It’s just constant, constant talking about himself.

Writing style
It’s trying -- and failing -- to be noir. The fact that Dresden talks about himself constantly doesn’t just make me dislike the character; it’s bad writing, and terrible world-building. He’s constantly dropping hints about himself, which I imagine are supposed to build mystery and suspense, but it has all the subtlety of a bowling ball out a window. No, I take that back -- a bowling ball out a window has more intrigue than these books.

So what did I really think?

Click "read more"

I think that’s painfully obvious, so here are some GoodReads reviews that say it a lot more eloquently (and hilariously) than I do: 

From a fan of the later books:

"It’s not even just that the protagonist is an asshole, though he is (and a multi-flavor asshole for extra points, with ‘sexist’ and ‘patronizing’ for topnotes). It’s not even that I hate this sort of lone ranger secretive warrior bullshit. … No, it’s actually just a bad book. It runs on coincidences, it’s all external forces and no internal."

And in reply, another fan:

"I do have affection for some of the later books. When the cast extends into the dozens, the whole thing is so much more enjoyable. Because, not coincidentally, it's not just about Harry freaking Dresden anymore."

On the sexism:

"...the jocular misogyny that litters the book: women are either hard bitches, whores, or damsels in distress-- sometimes in turn, sometimes simultaneously-- but they are *always* liars of one stripe or another, and always either in need of a good seeing to or engaged in doing just that without his aid, at which point they're back to being whores again." 

Unreliable narrator:

"I started reading the book as if Dresden was an unreliable narrator with a deluded view of himself: it certainly explains the social awkwardness, the fact he goes around wearing a duster over sweatpants and a T-shirt(!), his propensity for getting out of breath, and his insistence on being "chivalrous" to Murphy even though she clearly told him it pisses her off."

The "chivalry" thing popped up early and aggressively. In the few chapters I did read, he discussed opening doors for women no less than three times, and in fact decided not to open the door for Murphy in one scene, in what I can only assume was some weird form of passive aggressive punishment for being a little too tough-as-nails.

Humor:

"Mr. Dresden has the sense of humour of Horatio Caine."