Review of Furies of Calderon (Author: Jim Butcher)

Furies of Calderon is a classic fantasy book in the Codex Alera series.

With barbarians at the gates of Alera, a land protected by furies (essentially elementals), Amara a newly trained spy must travel to dangerous and remote parts of Alera to discover whether a High Lord (Atticus) is a traitor intent on taking the throne of the First Lord for himself.

Encountering Tavi, a young sheep herder who has not found his own personal furies yet and move into a world of high drama, intrigue, adventure that will threaten their very lives. With magic, monsters and more, this first novel in the Codex Series sets up the intrigue well.

Although I have read hundreds of fantasy books, surprisingly I only picked up a Jim Butcher fantasy book a couple of weeks ago, and now have a lot of catching up to do. His writing is refreshing in its ability to create pretty decent and intricate plots, complex and flawed characters while still making it easy to read and understand – this is a talent that only a few writers have. As you being reading this book you soon find yourself immersed in the high adventure and intrigue of the story that is like a combination of tales from the Roman empire, Lord of the Rings and the Sword of Truth series.

Butcher has managed to set the story out very well, leading you into the action almost straight away and presenting you with a twist almost immediately (one I didn’t see either!) – his style is different to most fantasy writers as he does move outside the box in many ways – while not as ‘flowery’ as George R R Martin, or as difficult to read, he does have the same attitude to writing and tends to write the story as it should be written not as we expect it to be written.

I cannot praise it enough; it’s definitely the best start to a fantasy series that I have read in a long time, and it’s up there with the best – it somehow portrays a real world, with real worries and strife – despite the magical elements, it is very easy to understand this world in which the adventure unfolds. Butcher avoids most of the standard clichés of the fantasy genre and instead brings an amazing ability to set up a scene and then let the story tell itself in a very natural way – it’s one of the only books I’ve read where I can actually conjure up a picture of the scenes as they happen – much like I am able to do with Lord of the Rings.

Butcher doesn’t force the story on you, but lets it unfold in its own way, switching between characters (both good and ‘bad’) to give a sense of ‘whole’ – I think the fact that ‘bad’ is such a gray area in this book is intriguing and more lifelike than many other fantasies I’ve read.

It is a shame that one of the major characters is a cliché - an orphan boy with no special talents who just might go on and save the world – wow, there’s Pug, Garion, Frodo and even Harry Potter who have all been there before – however, this is the only criticism I have, and once you forget about the cliché, even this character (Tavi) strays away from the cliché as his youthful exuberance and sexuality begins to surface.

So far this is one of the best books I have read in the fantasy genre, and I hope that this will continue in the rest of the series.