Jim Butcher, CHANGES
Changes by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Love, all alike,
no season knows,
nor clime,
nor hours, days, months,
which are the rags of time . . .
If Cormac McCarthy's The Road is about the bond between father and son in a dead world, Jim Butcher's Changes concerns the bond between a father and a daughter he hadn't even known he'd existed until a few days before, in an almost virulently fecund world, a tropical world of malevolent Magick and predatory vampires.
Harry Dresden, Chicago's only consulting wizard, has just discovered that he has an 8-year-old daughter, Maggie Rodriguez. Long ago, her mother, Susan Rodriguez, was Harry's lover -- until she was attacked by his enemies, leaving her body and soul torn between her own humanity and the bloodlust of the vampiric Red Court. For her sake as well as Harry's, Susan fled to South America, where she could fight her savage gift and the monsters who cursed her with it.
But Arianna Ortega, Duchess of the Red Court and daughter of the Red Court's king, discovered Susan's secret, and plans to use it against Harry. The Duchess blames Harry for the death of her husband, and she has desired revenge ever since. Now Harry must take the battle to the Duchess, on her own home ground, where the might of the Red Court is strongest.
To save Maggie, Harry will have to do the unthinkable. The raging fury of his untapped power has always been his greatest temptation. Now he may have no choice save to embrace the darkness within himself.
Because this time, Harry's not fighting to save a client, the Council, or the world. He's fighting to save his child. . . .
There is something about Jim Butcher's stories of Harry Dresden that I love: the gritty, tell-it-like-it-is realism, the rough humor, the unabashed embrace of Magick as a reality all its own, without apologies or rationalizations of the sort that make many other authors' depictions of Magick at large in the world either precious, even twee, or a matter of one deux ex machina after another, and in either case unconvincing and rather revolting. Harry is the sort of man who, as a teenager, you just know had his Magickal gear strewn all over his bedroom, through the garage, and all over the backyard the way other boys did the same with the guts of their first cars. The sort of man whose had his heart broken again and again, and has maybe broken a few hearts himself. A man who is very used to the corruption of Chicago and the ways of the world in general and can navigate them both and come out of it reasonably intact. But he is also a man who can love deeply, who is more than willing to battle for the right, "to march into Hell on a heavenly cause," and keep on battling even when that cause seems hopeless. A trait that will serve him well as he takes on the forces of Hell itself to rescue his young daughter.
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