Peace Talks

I need to make a distinction between the story and the writing here.

The basic story is decent. It's also only half a story, if I understand correctly, because it was split in two after being deemed too long for a single volume. The story we got in this volume is fine, but it's not complete, and there are only a few major beats in it, though they're very major indeed. The splitting of the story has not, of course, affected the sale price, which is somewhat higher than average for most complete stories. Publishing realities are what they are, and I don't propose to value works based on their length, so I'm not making too big a fuss about that. But I feel compelled to mention it.

The writing is atrocious. I'm not sure if these have always been this badly written and I overlooked it, or if the prose has gone downhill, but it's not good. The narrative voice clearly wants to be clever, and it doesn't work — too cutesy by half. Harry's family focus also gets shoehorned in awkwardly at weird times; not that it shouldn't exist, but it's badly out of place. Butcher also delves far too much into the bad sexual focus that is the stock in trade of plenty of other, crappier urban fantasy. You have to expect a bit of that given the previous development of the White Court, but it's excessive.

This is apparently the 16th of these I've read. I always thoughy Butcher was on the better end of the urban fantasy spectrum, admittedly a cursed genre to begin with, but I'm wondering if I've been wrong about that. I'd like to know where this story is going, but I'll have to think hard about whether to read the follow-up when it hits later this year.