There is a mix of enough elements - action, politics, magic and romance - to keep many readers happy, but none ever get deep enough to force a reader to stop and think. He does a good job showing rather than telling. Butcher is a smooth writer, always encouraging you to read the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page and chapter (and the next book). No fewer than three quotes on the back jacket cover of Academ’s Fury label this series a “page-turner” (a fourth quote calls it “a stay-up-all-night-till-you-finish-it book”) and the description is apt. Isana’s concern for Tavi sends her from Riva to Alera Imperia, to warn him that he, too, may be a target of the Vord. Meanwhile, back in Riva, Bernard and Amara work with Doroga (whose “noble savage” race, the Marat, invaded Riva in the previous book) to halt a new invasion by the Vord, a race that strongly evokes Star Trek’s Borg with a large dash of Eddings’s Seeker.įinally, in the role of Eddings’s Aunt Pol we have Isana, whose water furies render her oddly ageless (a la Jordan’s Aes Sedai). In Academ’s Fury Tavi takes on a Harry Potter-esque mantle as well, as a student at the Academy who is bullied by the malicious son of an aristocrat and his cronies while befriending and leading several more good-hearted students in missions for Killian, the aged spymaster (himself similar to Chade in Hobb’s “Assassin” books).

He’s thus reminiscent of Pug from Raymond Feist’s Magician, or Bink from Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon.

Tavi, the protagonist of one of the primary storylines, continues in the orphan-with-a-mysterious-destiny role he remains abnormally without even a single “fury,” the elemental familiars that all (other) people in Alera bond with to work magic.

While reading that volume isn’t strictly necessary to understand this one (each book in the series is self-contained), it is recommended as the characters and situations are more fully introduced in the previous volume: Tavi, Isana, Bernard, Amara, Doroga and more all make repeat appearances here. Academ’s Fury is the second volume in Butcher’s “Codex Alera” series, picking up two years after the first volume, Furies of Calderon, ended.

Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher