my favorite scene in Changes was the duel in his domain.
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Agree? Disagree?
My favorite thing about
Changes is Harry gets to go into the final fight without a bunch of injuries that hold him back. I think it allows for more awesome.
The story arc starting with Grave Peril and ending with Cold Days represents, in my mind, some of his best writing to date. Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Knight, Turn Coat and finally closing out with Changes, are the strongest in books in this run. It has a strong and scary antagonist as represented by the Red Court, and the fleshing out of the supporting characters is finished. Cold Days answers a lot of the questions raised in this arc and features the death of Maeve and the reveal of Nemesis. Mab's purpose is revealed and Harry finds that his choices in Turn Coat will have a price.
Agree. Comparing those books to these books help illustrate why PT/BG aren't as good as they could be.
As Harry reveals in his talk with Justine on the boat, the whole of Peace Talks and Battle Ground was just a big diversion to get the Walker onto Demonreach.
In the GP-CD story arc, we have vampires as the main villain with the background threat of what turns out to, likely, be Nemesis.
1 Here we have the foreground threat of the Fomor and the background threat of Nemesis. The background threat is done in such a way that I'm not worried about it at all. It doesn't add anything to these books. And the Fomor seem to be a parade of arrogant incompetents who are only good at having mooks. They don't feel half as threatening as the Red Court did to me.
That's half my problem with PT/BG. Continuity errors are the other half. If I notice them, they drive me crazy, and there are so many in these books. I have other problems with these two books, but I don't think there big enough to warrant much complaining.
I'm going to have to read them a couple more times before I can firmly say where they fall on the DF scale of quality. (It's kind of like how I told a friend who owns a restaurant that his signature item was he least good item because it was just good, and everything else was fantastic. I don't think we've had a "bad" book yet).
1: The threat could be all sorts of shadowy figures plotting in the background. The Black Council, the Circle, and Nemesis could range from one threat to several distinct threats with all sorts of degrees of interrelatedness somewhere in between.