I am DNF'ing this book at 229 pages (just shy of halfway)
I had heard so many amazing things about this series. I am currently in Japan for the next three months and I needed a good decently sized fantasy book to get me though a chunk of it....I got about halfway in about a week and couldn't take anymore.
So, I know this series was started with two silly topics, but I think both of them weren't really done that well. I understood the Pokemon references (I mean, there is a mountain (?) called Garados....XD) and I could see the roman legion-ness...but honestly neither of these things made the story any better for me.
I really hate when the author names the characters similar names...I guess that's common in Roman times to have names that honor others and such...but he didn't make them interesting enough for me to remember who was who. And as I'm dyslexic, having indistinguishable characters with similar names name it IMPOSSIBLE for me to keep them straight. Gaius Sextus.....honestly tho. Besides the shitty naming the characters were super boring. I honestly couldn't care less about what happened to any of them. I felt like they had no personality and when bad things happened to them, I didn't really feel myself rooting for them to win. I also felt like things would happen to them just to try and give the story substance...or to move the not so good plot forward. Kinda. I think there was so much action that I didn't know what the plot was....and then once I figured out the plot I felt like it had just been thrown in there randomly so that the story would have a plot. Period.
If you are looking for a rich world, you won't get it here. You are just kind of thrown in. The world history is thrown at you as you go along, almost as if the author is making it up as he wrote the book. And the furies? LAME! I didn't really understand how they worked. I mean, I understood that they chose you based on your skills to furycraft an element (like water or fire), but I had a hard time picturing what they looked like or how they did some of the things they did.
At the point I DNF'ed, I decided I didn't care if I came across any spoilers, so I looked up the book's fan-wiki. I was bored just reading the summary...At no point was anything the wiki said a surprise nor was it something that I thought would be interesting to read. I then read the last few pages and decided it really wasn't worth it to read all the middle bits, so I put it down. Also, I did find the plot points in the other books to be interesting enough for me to continue reading so I decided to sell all the books once I got back to the states.
I do plan on reading his Dresden Files series (as I did enjoy the first few chapters I read as a sampler), so I'm not completely giving up on Jim Butcher. I am just giving up on this series.
I had heard so many amazing things about this series. I am currently in Japan for the next three months and I needed a good decently sized fantasy book to get me though a chunk of it....I got about halfway in about a week and couldn't take anymore.
So, I know this series was started with two silly topics, but I think both of them weren't really done that well. I understood the Pokemon references (I mean, there is a mountain (?) called Garados....XD) and I could see the roman legion-ness...but honestly neither of these things made the story any better for me.
I really hate when the author names the characters similar names...I guess that's common in Roman times to have names that honor others and such...but he didn't make them interesting enough for me to remember who was who. And as I'm dyslexic, having indistinguishable characters with similar names name it IMPOSSIBLE for me to keep them straight. Gaius Sextus.....honestly tho. Besides the shitty naming the characters were super boring. I honestly couldn't care less about what happened to any of them. I felt like they had no personality and when bad things happened to them, I didn't really feel myself rooting for them to win. I also felt like things would happen to them just to try and give the story substance...or to move the not so good plot forward. Kinda. I think there was so much action that I didn't know what the plot was....and then once I figured out the plot I felt like it had just been thrown in there randomly so that the story would have a plot. Period.
If you are looking for a rich world, you won't get it here. You are just kind of thrown in. The world history is thrown at you as you go along, almost as if the author is making it up as he wrote the book. And the furies? LAME! I didn't really understand how they worked. I mean, I understood that they chose you based on your skills to furycraft an element (like water or fire), but I had a hard time picturing what they looked like or how they did some of the things they did.
At the point I DNF'ed, I decided I didn't care if I came across any spoilers, so I looked up the book's fan-wiki. I was bored just reading the summary...At no point was anything the wiki said a surprise nor was it something that I thought would be interesting to read. I then read the last few pages and decided it really wasn't worth it to read all the middle bits, so I put it down. Also, I did find the plot points in the other books to be interesting enough for me to continue reading so I decided to sell all the books once I got back to the states.
I do plan on reading his Dresden Files series (as I did enjoy the first few chapters I read as a sampler), so I'm not completely giving up on Jim Butcher. I am just giving up on this series.
