Books shelved under “Urban Fantasy”

Proven Guilty is probably my favourite Dresden Files novel my second-favourite Dresden Files novel, after Small Favor. It has almost all of my favourite parts of the Dresdenverse in it: Murphy, the Carpenters, Faerie, and sticking it to the White Council. Jim Butcher manipulates the relationships he's developed over the past seven books to play on motifs of love, family, and temptation. If Dead Beat showed us how much Harry has changed, Proven…

Let us take a moment to look back at how far Harry Dresden has come from busting a sorcerer in Storm Front. Since then, he has started a war between the wizards and Red Court vampires; he has killed a faerie queen and prevented a war between the Summer and Winter courts; he has been offered the mantle of Winter Knight and picked up the Blackened Denarius of Fallen Angel Lasciel. Last time we…

Vampires on the set of a porno! Vampires who feed through sex rather than blood, no less! And one of them is Harry's half-brother.

Yeah, that's right. I dropped a major S-bomb in the third sentence of the review. You see that spoiler alert? I don't fool around with those things. Deal with it.

Speaking of dropping bombs, Jim Butcher does that a lot in Blood Rites. As with Death Masks, the story…

I'm discovering that it's almost impossible to review a Dresden Files book without resorting to spoilers. So many awesome things happen that trying to discuss the book without mentioning them would be a severe handicap to any review. Death Masks is no different in that respect. After Summer Knight put the fate of the world on Harry's shoulders, Death Masks returns to the personal conflicts that embodied the first three books of the series. Once…

Faeries are even better than vampires. Firstly, you can actually make a deal with faeries and compel them to honour the deal. Secondly, that makes them even more deadly, because they're usually clever enough to twist the deal so it ends up harming you anyway. Just as Jim Butcher can't claim credit for vampires, he can't claim credit for faeries, but he sure can claim credit for the characters he creates to personify each…

So I don't like werewolves but do like vampires. Some of you will never forgive me, I know. Others will be happy I've taken a side. But if you hold up Fool Moon against Grave Peril, there's no contest. Dresden Files #3 is where it the magic happens. (You may groan.)

With another in media res opening, Jim Butcher plunges us back into the Dresdenverse while simultaneously expanding it even further: Knights of the…

Time for another confession: I am unfairly prejudiced against werewolves. Maybe it's because I have an irrational fear of dogs, or maybe it's just the whole icky shapeshifting aspect, but I've never liked werewolf-oriented fantasy. When my favourite supernatural series has a book or episode featuring werewolves, I just don't enjoy it as much. For that reason alone, while my re-reading of Storm Front persuaded me to give it a fourth star, I was…

Returning to the first book in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series is like returning to a favourite vacation spot—one of those cozy ones that are well-known and well-regarded but never very busy for reasons you can't quite figure out. The temperature is just right, the weather is just like you remembered, and you have all the time in the world … to watch Harry get his ass kicked.

Harry Dresden. Those are the only two…

Margrit Knight is a New York lawyer who likes late-night runs through Central Park, cutting deals with a dragon crimelord and a vampire businessman who are centuries-old sworn rivals, and flying naked through the city at night with a gargoyle with whom she is falling in love. And she has no superpowers. Rather, her ability to negotiate among the five Old Races is due to the fact that Humans Are Special, and the affable…

What's an urban fantasy book without magic and wizards? What do you get when you take vampires and add to them dragons, djinns, selkies, and gargoyles? Heart of Stone, while not exactly original, is different. That works in its favour.

As I began my post legentem dissection, I discovered that there's a lot about Heart of Stone that, taken alone, doesn't work. For example, the dialogue is lacklustre and occasionally even groan-worthy. In most…

I don't judge books by their covers, but sometimes covers do say a lot about the book they contain. The cover of my edition of The City & The City is in washed out blue, with a stylized title and the skylines of two different Eastern European cityscapes—presumably, the modernized Ul Qoma, and its neighbour, Besźel. It's a very nice cover. Alone, it is aesthetically pleasing. Yet it also captures the atmosphere of the story…

There are so many ways to describe Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone. It's a sombre symphony of motifs, ranging from women's independence and sexuality to the ramifications of rapid industrialization. And deceptively so—despite the intriguing back cover copy and the seductive tagline, "a novel of automated anarchy & clockwork lust," I wasn't quite convinced of The Alchemy of Stone's brilliance until the denouement, when everything suddenly came together in a wonderful, cathartic…

On the whole not a bad book, but it didn't strike a chord with me. The story was lacklustre and the writing, while at times good, was also pretty bland. That’s Underground’s major problem: I couldn’t bring myself to love it, nor could I let myself hate it. It’s mediocre.

Harper Blaine, the female once-nearly-dead PI with a touch of magic, is a fairly likable character. She doesn’t get on my nerves the way…

Faerie Tale is at times delightful urban fantasy and at other times heavy-handed and forced. I really liked it the first time I read it, several years ago, but upon re-reading it I’m forced to pay attention to its flaws as well as its fun parts.

My attraction to and enjoyment of Faerie Tale stems from the atmosphere that Feist creates and sustains through the entire book. The threat of the mischievous faeries to the…

In one sentence: my review of The Man with the Golden Torc stands double. In fact, I'm beginning to feel almost as repetitive as Simon R. Green, just by reiterating this! However, there are things I missed in my previous, somewhat-hastily-written review, so I shall address those now.

Firstly, Green has too many characters and doesn't know what to do with them. I wonder if he just can't control his urge to explore every cool…

After discovering Simon R. Green through his Nightside series, I was looking forward to this new series. While The Man With the Golden Torc is occasionally entertaining, overall I was underwhelmed.

The culprit in this case is a repetitiveness on the part of the author. He reuses certain phrases often, and it's not clear whether this is done intentionally, for the sake of irony, or if he's just not that inventive. Also, is this book…

I won't lie: I plucked this book from the library shelf because it had a blurb from Jim Butcher on the cover. I was not disappointed.

Simon R. Green's created a wonderful milieu in the Nightside, a shady alterna-London where it's eternal night and its supernatural inhabitants fit the mood. His protagonist, John Taylor, is the perfect mix of capable and scary-dangerous. He's not quite as fun as Harry Dresden, but he's got a good…

What began as a fairly bland, contrived plot soon became an entertaining adventure. Living with the Dead was a pleasant surprise.

I can't say many good things about the book's main character, Robyn Peltier. Kelley Armstrong has her flee the scene of a murder not once, but twice, purely because the plot requires Robyn to be a murder suspect. From that point onward, I expected the book to be fairly clunky. Instead, it rapidly…

Significantly better than the first book in this series, Whiskey and Water picks up the loose ends from Blood and Iron and sustains them through half the book, building to a much more satisfying climax consisting of multiple battles and tense magical standoffs. My gripe: why did I have to wait for book 2 for all that heavy worldbuilding to pay off?!

As with its predecessor, Whiskey and Water suffers from a surfeit of mythology…

Although vampires play an important role in this book, vampirism is not the central subject. Rather, Hubbard uses vampirism as the method to explore a girl coming to maturity amid a broken family unit. Hubbard addresses questions of ethics and coming-of-age. Unfortunately, the story is mediocre.

My main problem is a lack of conflict. Each time the story approaches something that resembles a high-stake scenario, it shies away at the last moment. For instance, after…