Skin Game - Jim Butcher

If you've never read one of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, you need to go to the bookstore and buy Storm Front and get started! Skin Game is the fifteenth book in the series and just came out on Tuesday, May 27. The last several books in the series had gotten very serious and Harry Dresden was in a dark place, making the books a little difficult to read--still enjoyable, don't get me wrong, but they were very heavy. Skin Game felt a bit more like the earlier books. The plot was still pretty intense, but Harry seemed much more mentally healthy.

I love how Harry can go from calling someone a "murderous murdering murderer" and shouting out "Parkour!" while actually doing parkour to being surprisingly insightful.

There's power in the touch of another person's hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There's a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands.

It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of fear?

The touch of another person's hands.

This was one of my very favorite passages in the entire book. It goes on, but I didn't want to fill the entire post with a book quote. Harry is still struggling with some moral issues in this book (without giving spoilers, it has to do with Mab, Queen of the Winter Sidhe) and is concerned that he may be changing for the worse and not even realizing it.

For those of you new to the Dresden Files, Harry Dresden is a wizard living in Chicago who goes from a sort of private detective to supernatural protector for the city. His narrative voice is a joy to read. He's mouthy and has a somewhat questionable sense of humor at times. He sets ridiculously high standards for himself, which can lead to some of his occasional angst about his moral state. Best of all, he's a avid movie quoter (which apparently isn't a word, but I'm going to pretend it is). In Skin Game, my two favorite moments are when he starts quotes Monty Python and the Holy Grail at someone who he thought was quoting but turned out to have no idea what he was talking about, and when he quotes The Black Hole and is greeted with incredulous reactions. I did a terrible job describing the scenes, but I couldn't quote directly without giving away plot.

Anyway, I highly recommend not only Skin Game, but the entire Dresden Files series (and the Codex Alera, also by Jim Butcher, which is lovely).