anti-recs

Title: Changes by Jim Butcher
Pages: 448 pages
Rating: -100 for morality
Genre: Urban fantasy

Let me start this off with a caveat--I love The Dresden Files series, both bookverse and TV-verse. I find the women strong and compelling; I love the snarkiness of the hero; I love the fact that not only does he get called on his chauvinistic behavior but that his sexism comes back to bite him more than once; the sheer insanity of some of the climaxes; the clichéd monsters that Butcher actually manages to make threatening. I've enjoyed the series, and while I wouldn't recommend that anyone start with the first few books (Storm Front, the first book in the series, particularly seems to piss people off), I do feel that the series gets better as it goes along.

And until this latest book was published, I would have stuck by that.

This book is the one that jumped the shark. In fact, given the series' motif, I'd say it jumped Cthulhu.

( Major spoilers for the book--and the book's ending--are under the cut. Also, long review is long. )