I probably need to do a complete reread of Twelve Months. I was very busy last week. My reading was both rushed but also limited by various duties I had to attend to. On top of that, I had a family event to attend in Southern California this past weekend, so I stopped about 3/4 of the way through and finished Monday night when I returned home.
I really enjoyed the first half to perhaps two thirds of this novel. At the moment I can’t pinpoint where the story started to lose momentum for me. It was only after I finished did I start to wonder what went wrong, why did my enjoyment of Twelve Months take such a sudden dip?
I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the YouTube channel, Red Letter Media. They do humorous reviews of really bad science fiction, fantasy, horror and action movies and TV shows. Sometimes they also do reviews of more serious fare and they often do retrospective reviews of older movies and TV shows. About a week or two ago they did a couple of fun videos about the first season of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
This channel has been around since near the beginning of YouTube but they really gained traction about ten years ago with a fictional dirty old man character named Mr. Plinket, who did a series of videos that dissected and thoroughly eviscerated; with a lot of dark humor, the George Lucas’ Star Wars sequels. The Disney sequel reviews were even more savage. Mr. Plinket has a line that he uses whenever a character does something that runs counter to clearly established character traits or does something that violates accepted cannon, but something that might happen so quickly that you do not immediately realize it. Mr. Plinket will say when pointing out these writing errors, “you didn’t notice it, but your brain did.” Consciously you didn’t pay attention to it, but deep down you pick up on these contradictions and they create a kind of cognitive dissonance. For me, the cognitive dissonance was really enjoying Twelve Months and then feeling something is really off here.
First off, I don’t think this is a terrible novel and it has some really good elements. It just has more flaws than I expect from a Dresden Files novel.
I’m not going to go into why I think Mab’s explanation of how love protection from the White Court can break down was problematic and how I think it could have been done better. I did that in the thread about True Love Protection yesterday. (And I am fully aware of how arrogant that might sound coming from someone who isn’t a published author or an author of any fiction at all.)
I am also not going to address Lara’s kiss with Harry and what I think was wrong with that. I think everyone’s missed something and I’m going to write about that later and probably in the True Love Protection thread.
I had a slight problem with Ebenezar deciding that he would no longer contest Harry’s decision to keep Maggie close to him and mellowing out rather quickly. I get that Ebenezar was shocked and ashamed that he lost control and tried to kill Harry so I can accept Ebenezar wanting to make amends, but that change seemed a bit fast to me.
There was some something else that bothered me about that conversation. Maybe I misread the conversation Harry and Eb had in Peace Talks about the White Court, but I got the impression that Ebenezar’s hatred of the White Court began long before his daughter became entangled with Lord Raith. I had the impression there was someone else the White Court corrupted who had been close to Eb. In their latest conversation Ebenezar only talked about Margaret and how angry he became because his only child had come under White Court influence. Maybe that is also another indication Twelve Months takes place in a different part of the Dresden Multiverse; I’m not certain, but even if that is the case it feels like lazy writing rather than a clue we are in a multiverse.
Carlos Ramirez is now what; a secret agent working with Harry while pretending to be an ordinary, paranoid White Council Warden? Where did that come from? Again, it could be a multiverse thing, but I don’t think so. For Ramirez to suddenly begin to trust Harry I think we needed another or extended scene to tie it together. Carlos meets Harry as a Warden, but when they are alone he tells Harry, “I’m going to extend you some trust, because I know you were setup by the Merlin and and someone else; someone whose voice I couldn’t identify, to be kicked off the Council. I overheard part of a conversation…” I’ll leave it you to figure what Carlos might have overheard, but you get the idea. Give us a reason why Warden Ramirez suddenly accepts that Harry might still be one of the good guys.
There were things I was expecting to happen that did not occur that I found a little disappointing. Now this is on me. Just because I expect something to happen doesn’t mean Jim has to write it that way.
First and most obvious, we didn’t get twelve months, we got about ten months “and then I had two more dates with Lara.” (Not a direct quote.) Really? I get that this might have been the best place to end the story, but it felt to me like Jim decided to save LTW coming to see Harry for the next book and also to save Harry from being summoned; probably just before the marriage ceremony, to the Mirror Mirror world until the beginning of that book as well. The second one is more understandable.
I thought we would see people from The Library show up. We will probably find out that those boring ordinary inspectors were with The Library, but they didn’t really do anything of interest. Maybe in the next book we will find out they planted magically immune listening devices in the castle. When Harry first noticed something kept passing overhead, I thought it was a drone that was sent up to watch Harry by someone from The Library.
Speaking about that, I don’t know how anyone else felt about the gargoyles, but I found them to be rather boring. I don’t have anything really good or bad to say about them. Maybe in a future book we will get a more full backstory and perhaps this will give them more depth.
Someone else said they thought this would have been a good time for Lea to make an appearance and they were disappointed that it did not occur. I can see their point of view on that. I thought this might have been a very good time for Elaine to reappear. We haven’t seen her since White Night and I think Twelve Months would have provided a good opportunity for her to show up and tell Harry, “I told you so” in regards to her distrust of the White Council and Harry getting kicked off of it.
Finally, I think that Lara Raith needed to show her teeth a bit more. (Figuratively speaking). Some readers have said she was retconned into a kinder and gentler Lara. I didn’t think of it as a full retcon, but those criticisms aren’t wrong either. I think Lara Raith is at her most fun for readers when her sexiness and intelligence are balanced by us seeing how dangerous she is, not by Harry telling us how dangerous she is.
Now I’m going to start writing why the scene where Lara kissed Harry was messed up. I hope you will enjoy it. It will be posted in the True Love Protection Thread. I will probably post it Sunday.
