This book was a lot better than the first, and I really liked the first. The first suffered from a slow start, which this one didn't have.

Academ's Fury also had a lot more character development than Furies of Calderon, and went more in depth into the magical system. There was still plenty of non-stop action.

The only reason I couldn't give it five stars is because of Jim Butcher's terrible, nonsensical, and inconsistent usage of language within the series as a whole (e.g., are we supposed to believe Aleran is identical to English? Because I assumed it was some form of Latin until his idiotic explanation of how lie can mean being prostrate and telling a non-truth. Those two bits of dialog would make no sense if Aleran was a Romantic language). It bugs the crap out of me, but I won't go into depth here. I'll write a blog post about it once I'm done with the series. Hopefully it will make more sense in the next four books.

The other thing that annoyed me is that I expected the vord queen to be more like the Formic queen in Ender's Game, in that, I assumed that as soon as the vord queen was killed, all of the Taken would stop dead in their tracks. This, sadly, didn't happen, and so I'm still left with questions about how the Taken really work.