Jim Butcher doesn't shy away from the bad stuff. So to go from the latest Dresden Files, with over a decade of improvements, to what (I suspect) has been stuck in a drawer for 20 years, was jarring. But this book feels like one of his earlier works, when he was still learning how to write. Jim Butcher is considered the author in Urban Fantasy/Paranormal fiction with his Dresden Files series, the vast majority of which is clever, engaging and well-written. You can't make it big without the word of mouth. The lack of payoff bothers most people I talk to about books way more then it does me. I found it hard to recommend Windlass to anyone even though I enjoyed it. The rest of the book is setup for the series but it has a payoff for most of the worldbuilding within the plot, and almost every character has a nice arc to reach by the end. I never gave the weird spider things a second thought, but for the series they are the most important thing in that book. Furies of Calderon (Codex Alera 1) succeeds at this in almost every way that Windlass fails. I think that if the novel had not focused so much on the aspects of the series that weren't going to pay off in the first part and instead given us more character change and personal development it might have been easier to get into. Everyone is more or less the same as they were at the start of the novel, and any examples that you have to discount this point are likely going to be everyone's favorite character because they stand out so much. There are character relationships that are implied but not developed enough to offer any sense of growth or change. There's obviously a lot of history but it's so far removed from current events that it felt like the context was unrelated. There's a big bad that's hinted at but we don't even have enough information to guess at what it is. The story reads like it's the first quarter of a much larger novel, and so everything is development and nothing is pay off. Everyone else seemed to be kind of waiting around for things to blow up so they could put out the fire, sometimes quite literally. It's the most interesting part of the book because it has a natural story arc as there is problem and solution for the cat clans at the end of the novel.
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