Furies of Calderon Author: Jim Butcher | Language: English | ISBN:
B001DISRBC | Format: EPUB
Furies of Calderon Description
For a thousand years, the people of Alera have united against the aggressive and threatening races that inhabit the world, using their unique bond with the furies - elementals of earth, air, fire, water, and metal. But now, Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, grows old and lacks an heir. Ambitious High Lords plot and maneuver to place their Houses in positions of power, and a war of succession looms on the horizon." "Far from city politics in the Calderon Valley, the boy Tavi struggles with his lack of furycrafting. At fifteen, he has no wind fury to help him fly, no fire fury to light his lamps. Yet as the Alerans' most savage enemy - the Marat - return to the Valley, he will discover that his destiny is much greater than he could ever imagine." Caught in a storm of deadly wind furies, Tavi saves the life of a runaway slave named Amara. But she is actually a spy for Gaius Sextus, sent to the Valley to gather intelligence on traitors to the Crown, who may be in league with the barbaric Marat horde. And when the Valley erupts in chaos - when rebels war with loyalists and furies clash with furies - Amara will find Tavi's courage and resourcefulness to be a power greater than any fury - one that could turn the tides of war.
- File Size: 872 KB
- Print Length: 516 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 044101268X
- Publisher: Ace (June 28, 2005)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001DISRBC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,001 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
According to a video interview Jim Butcher gave, he started writing the Codex Alera series on something of a dare: someone challenged him to write an epic sword-and-horse fantasy based on the two things the challenger found most annoying, those being "Pokemon and lost Roman legions". One would think this would be an awkward combination, but in Jim's hands, it's something new and original to bring to the genre. I love the modified Roman Empire milieu, and the concept of "fury-crafting", of working with elemental beings which can shape the substance of things around the crafter, fascinates me.
That said, I also approached this series on something of a dare: a rather strident teenaged fan of Jim's urban fantasy series, "The Dresden Files", came onto the forums on Jim's website, blasting the Codex Alera series and practically ordering Jim to stop writing it and focus his time and talent on more Dresden Files books. His reason: "Codex Alera sucks because it isn't the Dresden Files". I'd only at the time scanned a few sample chapters of Furies of Calderon and had found it a little hard to tune into (I'm a little leery of epic fantasy since, to me anyway, the bar got set so high by greats like J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard), but I decided to give it another shot and see what the kerfuffle was all about.
I'm glad I rose to the challange set by this otherwise forum troll: In some ways, the book is a set-up for the series to come, but it is still a very worthwhile read. The characters are life-like, complex, and very sympathetic -- even the antagonists: the Marat might, at first glance, seem like mere barbarians who work closely with the totem animals of their tribes, but as the story unfolds, we find they are a complex community of individuals with their own psyches and ideas.
Spoilers - just so ya know. Oh, and snark.
Furies of Calderon is your standard fantasy story. The novel takes place in a quasi-medieval past time on an alternate Earth or some kind of Earth-like space populated by humans. Everyone in this world has a Fury, which is some kind of sentient elemental power that attaches itself to a person when they're hitting puberty and allows them to do elemental magic. The stronger your Fury, the stronger magic stuff you can do. Some people even have more than one.
There is a boy protagonist (Tavi), teenaged, who is an outsider (sort of) because he doesn't have a Fury. He is special in some other way that is hinted at yet never revealed in the book because this is volume 1 of who knows how many and there has to be some way to make you read the next 6 books, right? Right. So, he's special and doesn't know it, is considered a freak by some and a pity case by others, wants to leave the "homestead" and go off to the "city" to study at the "university" so he can make something of himself. And, by gum, his dreams are gonna come true! (cue Disney music)
And, of course, we have the familiar set of Kings and Queens and Knights and nobles and Homesteaders and serfs and all that jazz. You'd think that people with such wildly different everyday circumstances from regular humans would find some wildly different way to organize themselves and structure their society. Nope. Damn humans, always the same.
To go along with this standard worldview is the standard political intrigue plot. Some noble somewhere doesn't like how the King runs things. He thinks he can do things better.
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