Jim Butcher's last few Dresden Files books (coming soon to a tv series near you...) have included little afterwords in which he tells the story of how he started reading SF, and urges readers to check out his new epic fantasy series (the "Codex Alera"). He explains that he's always wanted to write that sort of thing, since discovering Tolkien at age seven:
My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C.S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it, I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber-- you get the picture.
Having found success with the Dresden books, he now finds himself with the chance to write in that vein, and Furies of Calderon is the first book in the new series (two more have been published since).
So, how is it? Well, it reads like the result of someone who started reading Tolkien, Lewis, Alexander, Leiber, Zelazny... at age seven, and decided to write a book that was a little like all of them.
The book follows two main characters: Tavi, an apprentice shepherd in the remote Calderon region of the empire of Alera, who wants to get out of the sticks and make something of himself, but doesn't have the resources; and Amara, a young woman who has just been promoted to Cursor, a sort of special secret agent of the First Lord who rules Alera. Amara's first assignment goes wrong when her former mentor betrays her; she escapes to warn the First Lord, who senses trouble stirring in the Calderon region, and dispatches Amara to find out what's going on. Meanwhile, Tavi and his uncle Bernard have stumbled on evidence of the nefarious plot being set in motion, that threatens the survival of their valley and the whole of Alera.
You can sort of tell from the set-up what you're going to get, here. It's kitchen-sink epic fantasy, with a little bit of everything, but it's all sort of familiar. The world is different enough to be interesting (magic is common, and done with the aid of "furies," which are semi-autonomous familiar spirits), but not too different from many other fantasy worlds (a vaguely Roman-esque empire, barbarian tribes who turn out to be less barbarous than first suspected). The plot doesn't go exactly where you might predict from the first couple of chapters, but it ends in the same general area.
If you've read more than a handful of books from that long list of authors above, well, this is in that vein. If I were twelve, I'd probably think it was genius, but as it is... It's competent epic fantasy. It's not bad-- it'd be somewhere in the middle of the list of authors above, in terms of quality-- but it doesn't have as interesting a voice as the Dresden books.
I may read the next one, probably on an airplane, but I'm not in a big hurry to.
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There's a character who's called "Cursor"?
Isn't one of the first rules of writing generic fantasy "Don't give your characters names [or titles] that mean something anachronistic or out of place to your readers"? (Viz., the character named "Aileron" in Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar trilogy.)
"Cursor" is a job title, not a personal name, but yeah. It's hard not to think of her as a blinking little bar in the middle of a line of text...
No, Cursor is a title not a name (it's a rank in the King's Special Ops Division).
Your review is dead on, but the series does get better as it goes. Still no original ideas, but the characterization gets stronger, the politics and threats become more complex, and the pace really improves. He unquestionably has a knack for writing a page-turner. My only complaint with the later books is that he gets worse at playing fast and loose with the scope and capability of magic. The power levels scale with plot/scene needs, not an absolute scale as they should. Still, I look forward to the fourth book and will continue to buy them in hardcover, although in part that's to further reward him for the Dresden books.