Butcher himself has said that the first book he ever wrote in the Dresden Files was just him practicing and that it is definitely one of the worst books he has written. Throughout the book there are large amounts of misogyny through the main character and poor world building throughout by not firmly defining anything between magic and its characters. 

The First Book: Misogyny

The main character Harry Dresden is known for being a misogynist throughout the books, especially in Storm Front. Butcher writes in parts of dialogue spoken by Dresden that very cleary puts it out that he sees them as for their physical appearance and that he “ogles at every women that he sees.” This trait isn’t just written into Dresden either by Butcher. He goes in depth about how good the women in the book look and their appearances but when a man is described it isn’t entirely thought out and he doesn’t spend much time writing about their appearances. Another way Butcher writes about women is that he uses their love to have an impact on the plot and never says anything about love a male character may give that would impact the plot. Despite the heavy misogyny written in the Dresden series overall it hasn’t appeared very much in any of Butcher’s other series which shows that it isn’t a reflection of Butcher himself, just his writing techniques.  

The First Book: World Building

Since this book was Butcher practicing his writing it has some flaws throughout the world of magic that it is based in. Throughout the book there are multiple settings that are visited and battled at but they all serve just a single purpose and then are moved on from and forgotten about. Butcher also writes in the magic the same way in that some of the spells serve a singular purpose and that the power of the main character is never truly defined. He can sometimes use spells that have extreme power with absolue ease but other times he uses a dinky little spell that does very little. Butcher uses magic to help extend the plot and uses it at his will by not putting a true definition of the abilities that Dresden has (Wordpress). 

Jumping from the first book to the seventeenth you would think that some of the negative aspects would change but sadly some of them have gotten worse. The books in between the first and seventeenth are way better written than these two but the seventeenth left many readers disappointed for the series. Battle Ground has a poor narrative, messy character building, and a structure that has aspects of being both good and bad. 

The Latest Implement: Poor Narrative

This book is mainly just action scenes with the main character who isn’t always in the important battles, it has very little other scenes that help progress the story and because of this it makes it feel like “one long drawn-out action scene where all the action is happening off screen.” Instead of having major events happen on the pages they happen on the side outside of the pages and are replaced by irrelevant events that are more filler than anything. The main character Dresden is written as that he is the ultimatum being of the universe he is in although he is just a regular guy with magic powers which puts the narrative out of balance because everything is focused on him instead of the major event that is leading to destroy the world. Butcher again uses Dresden’s magical abilities for plot purposes only and never clearly defines them. His level varies drastically throughout the book and is either super powerful or weak depending on what is best to move the plot along (Mather - The Quill to Live).

The Latest Implement: Character Building

Since this book was supposed to be one big book combined with the one that came before it but was unable to because it was too large it lacks aspects that it should have but instead were put into the other book. This one Butcher put all the action scenes into with very little in between them which means that all the characters that are still together and the new ones introduced don’t get explained very much and the growth of the characters relationships are not gone into. Even though there was a death of one of the main characters it didn’t have any impact on the characters that had a deep connection with that character before and the book just went on as if nothing big really happened. The new relationships that happen after the character dies don’t exactly fit right with each other and since there were so many new characters introduced it decreases their characterization. Butcher went for quantity of quality with the characters in this book and many of them didn’t add to the overall plot and were just more of fillers as discussed in the Narrative segment (Mendez). 

The Latest Implement: Structure

Lastly the structure of Battle Ground. Again since this book was split up and only included all the action scenes the pacing went by very fast and was just fight after fight after fight. This caused the battles to lose some of their excitement throughout the book because there were so many of them. The last half of the book is also just one really big and long action sequence that includes the death of the main character which came out of nowhere and felt almost pointless to happen. Butcher writes in characters so he can put them aside for the plot and once he needs them he can bring them out, but other than for certain plot building the characters aren’t really written about. The overall flow of the book does go together though. It clearly sets up the plot in the beginning, has midpoint escalation, foreshadowing of events, and comes together at the end. Despite the structure being confusing and full of action it still works for what the book needed to accomplish (Scribblermendez).