Angry Blinky Thing

After finishing Academ's Fury, I had to wait a week to get Cursor's Fury, then finished it over three or four days.

It was a very good book, continuing the storyline from the first two books. We got a little bit of a hint of the problems with his relationship with Kitai that I was speculating about previously. We also saw Tavi continuing to grow, and take command of a situation even more than previously. We found out quite a bit more about Max's background.

I actually feel like the title was a bit of a misnomer, though; while, technically, Tavi was a cursor throughout, he was acting as a legionare through most of the book.

This one did have more of a Roman feel than previous volumes. There were more Roman names, including finding out that Tavi was short for Octavian (apparently named by his Aunt, although perhaps Octavian is just for eighth). I liked the use of the Gracchi, even if they were pushing for abolition of slavery, rather than land ownership reform. And having Tavi's cover name being Scipio when he's in the military was also a nice touch. And I laughed almost immediately upon starting when Tavi is playing a game called ludus (latin for game or school) with Varg.

I suppose it's possible the difference in feel could be just because of the action all taking place in the nation of Alera, proper, rather than in Calderon, but I think that only explains the first book, not the second.

In any event, I thought the book was very well done, and, like most of Butcher's books, very hard to put down. My only disappointment was that the catapults we saw early on in the book were never used against the Canim. A Knight Flora using a catapult the same way they use bows now would be quite intriguing.

It will definitely be interesting to see if Tavi is officially recognized as the heir in the next book. And there were two teasers about his furies appearing, but they were only teases. We did find out why they haven't appeared yet, though, and might show a reason for them to still be possible to show up, despite Tavi being (at least) four years past the point where one would expect them to manifest.

It'll also be interesting to see what happens to Tavi's legion after this, although I suspect it won't be considered important enough to be mentioned. Losing the commander and senior NCO at the same time, especially as a follow-up to losing the majority of the soldiers in the legion, would be awfully tough to take.