Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Battle Ground (Dresden Files Book 17)

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No Spoilers Review - Part II of Peace Talks

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

This was one of the most sweeping Dresden novels Jim Butcher has written. If it had been combined with Peace Talks as one novel, I would say it was his best book yet. I strongly recommend that you read, or reread, Peace Talks directly before reading Battle Ground. Like Changes, it builds upon all the previous novels and the Dresden universe will never be the same.

I am more convinced than ever that Peace Talks and Battle Ground were originally intended to be one novel and the publisher played games with loyal readers. Usually Butcher spends the first half of a novel building up the suspense and laying the groundwork for great action and a compelling finish. Peace Talks was an exception, with lots of building up and then an abrupt ending. Battle Ground is also an exception, it has almost no build up – it starts directly where Peace Talks ends – and is almost continuous action until a satisfyingly extended conclusion. Taken as a pair, they make for an excellent story. Neither novel does a great job standing alone. My five-star rating is for the combined story.

Battle Ground brings in many characters that have not been seen in a while. There are several surprises, but all make sense (and I only saw one of them coming and am kicking myself for not having seen another). The main plot of Peace Talks is resolved and progress is made on several other fronts. This book is highly recommended with the caveat that you first read Peace Talks.

There is also a bonus short story that takes place six months after Battle Ground ends.

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Chris

I think I'm done with Dresden Files

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

This was a really disappointing follow up to Peace Talks. I think I'm done with the series. Something went wrong around the time that Butcher started levelling Harry up every book. All the charm is gone. Dialogue is repetitive. The relationships are stupid. A significant number of characters are there just to be there - no real purpose. I was bored and had to struggle to finish.

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Poor Richard

No Spoilers Review - Part II of Peace Talks

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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Chris

I think I'm done with Dresden Files

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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Sean Embry

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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Mr. Butcher delivered a steaming pile of boring fight descriptions. This and his previous offering are quite off interest. This has killed my interest of his efforts going forward.

I read his book, so I'll pay the price. Just don't expect me to do so again.

Mr. Butcher - these last two books are a hack not worthy of you.

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MrsLeif

One Huge Epic Fight!

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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My heart is still pounding from all the action!!! One Huge Epic Fight!

Also, my heart is a little broken now. I was expecting what happened but not the way it happened.

Dresden, you have done it again! I can’t help but root for you. You make yourself responsible for everyone and you want to keep everyone safe.

This time Chicago and its people, human and supernatural lives are all at stake. The Fodor and Ethniu, the Titan, are coming to destroy it. The White Council, the White Court, the Summer Court, the Winter court, Marcone with his people, the Knights, the werewolves, and every other group I forget are all taking a truce and battling one enemy together. If not, there won't be a next day for many of them. Apocalypse is in the mirror.

There were so many things l liked about Battle Ground. I want to tell you but then I'm spoiling it for you. Few comments though:

I know Dresden doesn’t care for Marcone but I kinda like him. I like Mab too despite her being utterly terrifying but I can't help but think about what she went through to become what she is now.

I love Waldo and Michael. They have Harry’s back Always. Sanja made me laugh, especially at the end.

Despite Dresden loving Murphy, I still have hope for Dresden and Molly (you're my girl) although I like Lara too.

I do hope this time Jim Butcher doesn’t take six years for the next book. I’m dying to see what happens next. Jim leaves so many clues as to what is to come and it seems Dresden will need 365 days to figure it out.

The adorable Christmas story at the end of the book was perfect. Anything with Mouse, Michael, Molly, Mab, and a little Christmas spirit together, has to be good.

Cliffhanger: No

5/5 Fangs

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Matt

Very disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2020

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(There are some light spoilers in here, but nothing significant if you've read the previous books)

To be fair, it is not this book alone that has been disappointing, it's been the evolution of the entire series and - likely related - what feels like Butcher's evolution as an author. There are two main issues which, again, are related:

1. The way Christianity has been slowly reworked in the story. When the Knights of the Cross were originally introduced, they were an interesting component of a larger universe, but far from the most important players. Angels are starting to pop up everywhere, and some of the conversations and characters are becoming grating. Michael's family has essentially evolved into the perfect Christian home, away from what used to be a loving but like-most-families occasionally problematic environment. Sanya - the atheist - and Dresden have a brief exchange at one point about having faith based on clear observations. Frankly the way the books have evolved its felt like (I have no idea) Butcher has had some sort of spiritual revival and its bled into the books in a way that is very irksome given how the series started. I did not begin reading a 17+ book compendium so that I could read a series slowly evolve into The Chronicles of Narnia.

2. As I mentioned, this second point is likely related to the first, but many of the characters are becoming really stale and one dimensional. This might be a product of having so many characters running around in books that are not particularly long, or it may just be that Butcher is becoming tired of the story, but when an important character dies in a novel you should care. I used to care. Lasciel's shadow's fate had me nearly in tears and that wasn't even a real person. Since that point in the series there has been a slow downward slide in the quality of character development and their depth. Fascinatingly, the characters that probably *should* be uni-dimensional, like Mab, have been getting extra attention and depth while characters like Murphy and Michael have become really stale. You can feel Butcher trying to flesh out Murphy's grappling with her injuries and invest you in her character arc, but it's done in such a ham-handed fashion that it just doesn't work.

Plus some of the dialogue and plot development is just incredibly lazy, these days. Near the end of the book when the bad guy just tells Dresden everything...why? They had literally zero reason to do that. They weren't compelled, they weren't even given an incentive. It was just a useful way to give the reader information. And Michael inviting Dresden to Christmas was extremely weird in the middle of the Summer. The purpose of that only becomes obvious once you finish the book. Such lazy writing.

Anyway, the battles are epic and the story is clearly heading somewhere earth shattering, which is enjoyable enough to read. Everything is becoming bigger and more grand in scale. But it feels like the process toward an epic confrontation has caused the small things to be left behind, and those are the pieces that really make a story work. I hope that Butcher remembers that before he goes any further with the series, or else I may just resort to reading book summaries moving forward, rather than paying $15 to be disappointed more and more with each installment.

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David Gray

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is . . .

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

Powerfully written and epic in scale, the book amply demonstrates the author’s many talents; indeed, the concluding chapters (including the previously released Christmas Story) are some of the best in the entire Dresden canon. But all of that is undone by the author’s continued reliance on a hackneyed plot device that is long past its sell-by date. The author excels at creating strong female characters, but looking over the novels since at least Turncoat one can only conclude that they are as flies to him. At this juncture, the series has devolved to a theater of torment where the reader endures Harry’s monologue of pain as women around him suffer mental or physical abuse. It is moving, and artfully written, and gritty and grim and real (if one care about that in one’s fantasy) — but it has grown repetitive, and numbing, and misogynistic, and cruel. Add in the fact that splitting the story into two books is a blatant cash grab, and a one-star review is appropriate.

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guttersnipe

Epic in Every Way

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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Word of Advice - Don't start the Dresden Files with this book. To reach the full emotional pinnacle, read the entire series.

The duology of Peace Talks and Battle Ground rival Changes for the most sweeping story in the Dresden Files. It starts and builds and builds and builds, and you are stopped cold like the end of a wicked roller coaster ride. There are very few missing major characters in the Battle for Chicago and only one new major character introduced. The twists of this rapid-fire ride will keep you turning page after page.

If you have been paying attention, you'll start to see the next evolution of Harry Dresden, Wizard (he's in the phone book.) As normal, Harry charges into overwhelming odds to save the mortals of Chicago and we get to gasp and yell and cry all the way with him.

The book was entirely worth the read and was as leveling as everything that 2020 has thrown at us. My heart hurts because this book brought it. BROUGHT. IT.

Harry is the best kind of hero and more, a needed reminder of how to be a good person.

Thanks, Jim Butcher - as always.

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Possible spoilers

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2020

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Generally I liked this book. It does tie up some loose ends and sets up new enemies for future books. But it is a curate's egg of a book, there were some not-so-good parts as well.

So the Big Fight that was due at the end of "Peace Talks" kicks off, and it is epic. Everything including the kitchen sink and the entire catalogue of a builders' providers gets thrown in, and it is suitably heroic and heart-wrenching by turns. The (kind of, if you squint and the light is behind them) Good Guys do win in the end, but it's not easy or cheap. And as usual, Harry ends up with more questions than when he started. There's some very good writing here, and I mean the prose style as well as the plot - Butcher has always been able to pull off twisty plots and action scenes, but Harry's dialogue has been a little bit juvenile at times. That's better in this book, Harry still can't resist trying to get off a zinger but the situation is so grave that he is finally showing some self-awareness and growing up a bit. Butcher's writing has improved (though he still can't resist pop culture references but eh, that's okay).

Now for the criticism. Warning for spoilers.

I AM SO TIRED OF DEAD LOVE INTERESTS BEING USED TO MOTIVATE THE MAIN CHARACTER. Seriously, this is the major flaw in the Dresden Files series: women are Sexy or Dead. Sometimes both. Mab is the only one getting character development and that is as much in service of Harry's plot arc as for her own sake.

And once again, a woman Harry loves ends up dead in order to give him further fuel to motivate his battles. Now, I can see why Butcher killed off Murphy (yeah, this is the Big Spoiler here) and looking back, he was probably laying the groundwork for taking her out. In the increasingly high-stakes world Harry is operating in, Murphy has no place. "She's only five foot but dang she's scrappy" doesn't cut it where people can take down buildings with a wave of their hand and reality-benders are two a penny. So far Murphy survived because she could always manage to get her hands on More Gun, but that only goes so far. Her major advantage was being the buffer between Harry and the police and official bodies, and when she was booted out of the department that, in hindsight, should have been a major clue that her days were numbered.

But honestly, it's fatiguing by now as a woman reading this series to tick off all the dead women who were Harry's love interests but then shuffled out of the way to advance the plot and give him fresh options. Let's compare Murphy with Marcone, who is a major mortal figure and who, in this book, is revealed to have obtained a much-needed power-up.

He needs this to compete on anything approaching level terms with the entities and beings that he is now playing amongst. This is the Big Boys' League and, despite any women players, I do mean Boys. If Gentleman Johnnie had been Lady Joanie, (s)he would be dead by now like Murphy, because Butcher doesn't seem to know what to do with women who are main characters but who don't revolve around Harry (Molly still has her Jupiter-sized crush on/infatuation with him, something that is going to be played up for major jealousy and cat-fights with another female character in future unless I'm badly wrong). So this is mainly why I'm docking a star from my review.

And even Marcone seems to be trailing Harry; he's still supposed to be Harry's major mortal nemesis, but I can't help feeling that he's starting to copy-cat out of envy: "oh, you had a fallen angel in your head? I want one, too!"

That brings me to my next point, which is that I'm starting to feel the need for a "Previously, on this programme..." because frankly the cast of new and current enemies is starting to get a little crowded. Though one of the new arrivals did account for, in an admittedly cool way, how come the Black Court is still around even if they got taken down hard before.

Harry is immensely powerful. Hugely, almost god-like, powerful. But brute strength is no longer enough, and he needs to slow down and start thinking. There's so much going on that he doesn't know and needs to know, and so many people secretly or even openly manipulating him, and he's burned a lot of bridges where he has cut himself off from access to knowledge that he desperately needs.

And that brings me to the final part, the set-up that will have everyone furiously debating. Just what exactly does Mab intend to happen with this "let's you and her get married" notion? She definitely has a plan, and Harry needs to start thinking about what he *is* - as a wizard, as a star-born, and as the Winter Knight. He's valuable for some reason and he needs to find out why.

So the end brings him around again to his beginnings, in a way that could be self-indulgent but instead is another marker of how very far along the road he has travelled. He gets his old dwelling place back, maybe not the same as it was when he started out young, cocking a snook at the White Council, and so very ignorant of the dangers he was playing with.

He knows a lot more now, he's been through a lot more now, and even if he has his basement back (and this is so stereotypically 'territorial wizard' it made me laugh - he may think the White Council are stuffy old dotards but he's behaving just like one of them) it's abundantly clear that 'you can't go home again'.

So I am definitely looking forward to the next book because there need to be answers to the questions that have piled up. Harry can't afford to keep bulldozing his way through problems, he needs to start knowing just what the battleplans are.

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Amazon Customer

The title is accurate: one giant, repetitive, pointless fight scene.

Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2020

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Mr. Butcher, please don't split a story like this again. This is the worst Dresden book to date. It's all one long, pointless battle scene, with lots of senseless violence and death (one death in particular, but the absurdity of the scale of destruction is honestly even worse than that horrible choice). The writing and plot are both quite repetitive; there was at least one sentence that got reused word-for-word, and whole paragraphs whose general points were recycled. If you even vaguely remember _Peace Talks_, do yourself a favor and skip the first half of the book: location 3052 of 6396 is the first scene that has critical plot development (although IT HURTS, so be warned). After that scene, jump ahead to about 3882, and keep going.

SPOILERS

The worst of it is, we find out at the end that the whole battle was a diversion by a Walker to make Harry let down his guard: it was LITERALLY pointless. It is clear that this was originally supposed to be a single book with _Peace Talks_: if you were to cut the tedious combat and description by half (or more), remove some of the (many) minor character cameos, and combine the two books together, it would actually make a pretty compelling story, AND the ending gut-punch realization, where Harry catches on at the last minute, would be MUCH more powerful. This would also allow for more development of this discovery, which is quite important to the overarching plot, but not given nearly as much space as it needs. As it is, we've forgotten what started this whole mess, way back at the beginning of _Peace Talks_, so it has no real emotional impact.
On top of this, the death of Murphy seems both a poor writing choice and poorly dealt with. I understand some of the story rationale for it; it gives character motivation, plus she just isn't in the same weight class as what Harry's facing any more. Unfortunately, Butcher has also now severed Harry's last tie to "us normal folks." Every other figure in his life has some sort of super-power (except Michael, but he's still got the angels guarding him, and he's never really been normal), which means that his battle to stay human isn't really meaningful any more. Additionally, Murphy's death is never dealt with emotionally: Harry has to lock it away in order to survive the battle, and it's not really addressed effectively after that; the whole Valkyrie thing is both weak and silly, given Murphy's pronounced Catholicism. I, personally, would appreciate Harry actually getting to have some sort of happiness, with Murphy being his "home base," along with his daughter. If Murphy could have had some sort of character development that allowed her to recognize that there IS strength and value in coordinating and organizing the team, rather than just being on the front lines, that could have worked quite well. However, if she HAD to be killed off, this was a poor way to do it.

I have been reading this series for almost 10 years now: I will follow Harry to the bitter end, and this mess is not going to make me quit. However, if Mr. Butcher (or his publisher; I don't know whose fault it is) pulls a stunt like this again, I will be returning the next book for a refund.

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Amazon Customer

6 years for this?

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020

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I will always thank Jim for his previous books. But six years for this? Either I've out grown the author or it is obvious he does not know how to finish his series. Harry is now a wooden two dimensional character. Either shame or rage. Sigh.

Good luck Jim. Thanks for the ride. I believe you could have done better after six years. I hope you do.

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