Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

[rowyn]

I have still been reading. For a while, I was reading graphic novels; maybe I'll do mini-reviews of those, too. Books I've been reading slowly, like one every week or two. But not this one.

No, Storm Front took about four and a half months to finish.

I bought this novel at ConQuesT about ten years ago. Glen Cook was vending books there like he did every year back then, and I asked him for recommendations. He suggested this one. When I got it home, Lut took one look and said, "I've got a copy of that. It's not very good." I stuck it with all the other books and forgot about it, untouched, until this May. When I was going on a trip and looking for something to read on the plane. Lut plied me with a couple of other books when he saw I was resorting to Storm Front, but I cracked it open on the plane anyway.

It didn't irritate me enough to say "This is bad and I'm not finishing it." But it never made me care about anything that happened in it, either.I read a little on the flight out, a little on the flight back, and finally left it at work on the theory of "if I am desperate for something to read on break and have nothing else, I can read this."

It's book one of the Dresden Files, and lots of people love it. I am not entirely sure why I am so unimpressed by it. Part of it is employment of my least favorite trope. "make sure your main character is up against forces massively more powerful than him, against which he stands no chance, with no allies, so that everyone can be super-impressed by his ability to survive." This tactic is highly recommended in some parts of the writing world, where if your character isn't fighting a five-front war with both hands tied behind his back while being tortured, you're going to easy on him. But it takes really kick-ass story-telling skills to pull this off with me, and this book did not have them.

Another factor: it reads rather like an urban fantasy version of 40s noir. The protagonist is an "old-fashioned" guy who treats women like they're a different and incomprehensible species. The women in the book are all damsels in distress -- ALL OF THEM, including the supposedly tough cop character -- who are at best useless if not an active detraction from the protagonist as he rescues them from their various predicaments. Or they get killed, when he's not around to rescue them. There might have been a minor female character that didn't die or get rescued by Dresden, but I forget who if so. (Oh wait, I remember one of the antagonist females survived the book without Dresden's help.) I forget if there were any non-white characters. If there were, probably antagonists because (see trope 1), Dresden has no allies and has to do everything himself.

Anyway, I don't necessarily hate white male power fantasies with abundant helpless gorgeous women to rescue. When it's actual 40s noir I am generally willing to overlook it as a product of its culture. When it's from 2000, I am kind of hoping for a more nuanced view of the world, though. The characters just felt very flat and uninteresting to me. I didn't care about them, or what happened to them, and the over-the-top drama at the climax didn't grip me. I put the book down several times during it, picking it up a day or three later when I didn't have anything else to read.

But if these things do not grate on one, I can easily see enjoying the book. It has other stuff going for it: I like the way Butcher puts in descriptions of scenes and characters, so that you get a sense of what the world looks like to the author instead of conjuring everything up yourself. I was amused by how many characters, male and female, were described as attractive. The central mystery more-or-less works as a mystery, neither too transparent nor too contrived and obscure.

It gets a 5 of 10 for me, though, and was in the category of "barely worth finishing".

Comments

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

I may have this book, and I've heard "good" things about the series. Glen Cook did his own noir detective series, which I liked as a teenager. But I've also heard about this other side of the Dresden files, about the way women are written, and it just makes me kind of tired.

My mom bought a couple of the Dresden books for some reason, then realized they were the middle of the series, so sent them to me, and I may have picked up the two first books but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think I might have liked the first book least of the series.

I found your review interesting, because it made me question why I liked it so much. I think the answer to that is that I came to it straight from other urban fantasy, which was all "tough powerful woman who is also gorgeous, surrounded by gorgeous men, gets to choose between multiple hot preternatural dudes while kicking preternatural tail all on her own. And all the dudes need her help."

After six or seven series' of those, finding a male version was a relief to me. It still is, because urban fantasy is predominantly about female narrators who get hot guys, notice hot guys, rescue hot guys and don't need hot guys.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

lythandra is very fond of the series; I've only read some short stories featuring Dresden that have appeared in anthologies. From what I've heard of later in the series, it just keeps getting amped further up, although there are better female characters (including a daughter) later. Although it sounds to me it's not that their femaleness is what makes the character useless, so much as the need for Dresden to be the awesome one, maybe? Dunno.

Must... resist... urge... to compare... my book...! ;)

-TG

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Wow, now I'm even less tempted to read it than before. And I had absolutely zero interest before, so that's impressive.

[nkcmike.livejournal.com]

I think I read 2 or 3 of the Dresden books, and decided that was enough.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I have a few friends who love the series, so I'm kinda relieved finding someone else who doesn't XD

One thing that really bugged me about the first one was what struck me as majorly sloppy worldbuilding - it goes on and on how magic anywhere near tech makes the tech not work, then provides music from a CD player for a ritual? WTF?

When I wondered if I should give another book a try to see if the series gets better, what decided me not to was the bit where Our Protagonist argued that the person who committed the murders was probably an angry woman because they were so gruesome, and women are more nasty then men.

[skyflame.livejournal.com]

Karrin Murphy gets much stronger as a character as the series goes on. There are also some serious bad-ass villains who are women, but they start appearing in books four or five, if I remember correctly.

[sf-reader.livejournal.com]

I was late coming to that series, perhaps 5 years ago, after occasionally seeing Jim Butcher at conventions. (He lives in Independence, MO) I liked it enough to read the rest of the series and to read his high fantasy series which came out about the same time that I first read his work.

While I don't anxiously wait for the next book to come out, it is one of the few series which I get in hardcover, rather than wait for the paperback version to come out.

It is formulaic, but it is a formula which works for me.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've tried to like this series; the author is a close-friend-of-a-close-friend, and I tried several of the first books in the series and was vaguely annoyed by them all. It doesn't help that I'm a better detective than the protagonist is. Your entry here, finally gelled what was going on in the back of my head and articulated what annoyed me most about Harry Dresden; he's a bad knock-off of Mike Hammer. (Who was no great shakes as a detective or an example of humanity himself).

Feh. I'll go back to reading Kat Richardson's Greywalker series instead. Thanks for the boot to the cerebellum, though.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yay for a Rowyn post! I know this post was a week or so ago, but the last time I checked LJ, it looked as if it had been broken, and my "Friends" page was completely obliterated, and the "new friends page" incomprehensible. (Or, rather, "incomprehensible in the next-to-nothing amount of time I was willing to spend on trying to learn the ropes of the new version." And since I've got the URL to check the OLD version of the "friends" page memorized, that's not likely to change for me anytime soon.)

Anyway, on to the book: I've heard of Dresden Files before, but never read up on it. Based on what you've said, I think the take on female characters would annoy me as well. NUANCED is what I want these days. I've read stories where every single female character is uber-strong and resourceful and absolutely NOT AT ALL like those other stories (i.e., we hate going North all the time, so we must go South all the time), sometimes with ineffectual male characters thrown in (or none at all!) for good measure, and while the first time or two might be novel, it's not the direction I'd like to see.

In anime, it seems too often that it's either the traditional male fantasy where all females are either damsels-in-distress or femmes-fatale, or simply NOT IMPORTANT ... or else it's the oddball switcheroo where we tell a story that could or quite literally DID originally have male characters, and we simply gender-swapped them to have powerful females. Or, we get "faux action girls." Or we get powerful competent action girls, but there are SEVERAL of them, rather than a single properly-developed heroine, and there's just one "don't you wish you were him?" male-viewpoint-character guy in their life who's the de-facto protagonist of the story even if he doesn't do anything of note.

If I were a real writer (i.e., someone who actually writes something rather than just lamenting about how I really ought to write something someday), I think I'd have trouble trying to figure out the right balance, though. I might "overreact" by focusing too much on what I want to NOT do. I'd probably need to run it by someone else with a different point of view for "gender role checking."