Reviews and Comments

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.

I liked a lot about this book.

The basic premise was intriguing: a rich computer nerd leaves, in his will, all his fortune and control of his company to whomever can solve a puzzle he built into his immersive World of Warcraft/Second Life style game. But to solve the puzzle, you have to know about the video games and pop culture from sixty years ago.

For the most part, I really liked the characters as well. There was a clear hero who was likable and easy to root for. There was a clear villain whom you loved to hate. And there were lovable sidekicks and a love interest. A pretty standard recipe, but a time-tested one.

And what I lived the most was the nostalgia. I'm a little younger than the author, but all the games he mentioned were the ones I grew up playing as a child. I was brought back to long nights playing Pitfall with my dad on our Commodore 64. It was nice.

And the description of this online world, OASIS, was amazing. I want to play this game so badly.

There were a few parts that didn't work well, though. For example, the characters' ability to solve the risks were terribly inconsistent. One riddle that should have been terribly obvious and shouldn't have taken more than three minutes to solve (and took me about ten seconds) took five years and only two people in the entire world were able to figure it out with no help. While wildly obscure riddles that should take months or even years of research are solvable in mere seconds.

The other thing that really was unbelievable for me was the amount of research these people were able to do. All of the things that Wade claims to have read, listened to, watched, and played would have taken half a lifetime, but he did it in five years. It's physically impossible. And it really bugged me the whole time I was reading.

If it hadn't've been for those two things, I would've given it four stars.