Review: Ghost Story, by Jim Butcher

Rating:

👻👻👻👻.75

First Response:

This one might be my favorite so far!

One Sentence Summary:

When we last left Harry Dresden at the end of Changes, he was dead… until he gets sent back to solve his own murder!

Tell Me More:

This book has put me in a tough position. On the one hand, it might be the best book of the series so far. We get to see Harry dealing with new challenges in a new world— the world beyond. As a ghost, Harry is limited in his ability to affect the material world, and he can’t use magic at all. Powerless is all the ways that matter, he has to adapt. No more going in, guns blazing, and whacking the bad guys with enough (literal) firepower to take down a troll. This time, he has to play the social game.

I’m sure you can guess how it goes.

This book felt fresh in a way the series has been sorely lacking recently. The last few books have been impactful, but none of them have pushed Harry quite as far as this one has (as far as inventiveness is concerned— Changes definitely pushed him emotionally). Without magic or the ability to affect the physical world, Harry is forced to rely on his friends more, and they aren’t necessarily welcoming to him after he’s been dead 6 months. The entire book hangs on a razor’s edge of trust and tension. It was actually quite fun to read!

The “problem” that scraped 1/4 of a star off this book was the “information game” it plays with certain events of the last book. <spoilers> There’s scenes that happened, but were removed from Harry’s memories, and therefore not relayed to the reader until they were dramatically revealed in the third act of this book. I had to take off the quarter star on principle. I don’t like the information game. Tell me what happens when it happens, or don’t tell me at all! (Unless you make it an aesthetic choice, like Stormlight Archive does, and build your flashbacks into the overalls structure of the book.) Keeping information from the reader in a mystery or mystery-adjacent novel is just cheating! Rargh! 🤪

This was a fun one, despite it’s flaws. I’m interested to see where the series goes next, as <spoiler> Harry takes on his new role as Mab’s Winter Knight!