I am going to keep the first portion of this post incredibly short and to the point. Racism has not been in quarantine. Jac and I are glad that justice is being sought against the officers that murdered George Floyd and America’s last strand of trust in the police. We support those raising their voices to fight the systemic racism that has permeated the fiber of this country.

BOOK CLUB

contains spoilers form ‘Blood Rites’ by Jim Butcher

Blood Rites was not messing around! The mystery itself isn’t the most compelling of the Dresden books, but man does it make up for it with character development. Also, props to Jim Butcher for managing to have the first book in this series that I don’t have a major rant about Harry being a complete misogynistic tool at worst and problematic at best while also being the book that takes place largely on the set of a pornography film. I think this is also the book where Jim Butcher seems to feel more confident in his writing. The Dresden Files are designed to be dark-comedies, and this is the first time that we really get to see Butcher stretch his comedic legs. It works well. 

At the start of the book, Thomas Raith asks Harry for help protecting his friend, Arturo, from a curse that Arturo believes is targeting him. Harry is reluctant to take the job. Thomas has done him some favors over the years, but Harry doesn’t know why Thomas has done that. Since Harry started a war with the Vampires, he’s reasonably cautious about possibly walking into some sort of trap. But his sense of obligation wins out and he takes the job, on the condition that afterwards Thomas will come clean about why he’s been helping him. Arturo winds up being a renowned pornography producer and the very real curse is targeting the women in his production. At the same time that Harry has his hands full trying to misdirect an entropy curse that is killing off the women in the production in increasingly comical ways,** he is fending off attacks from Mavra of the Black Court of Vampires, who has a grudge against him ever since he tried (and nearly succeeded) to kill her, and certainly offended her, at Bianca’s ball the night he started the war. 

The mystery of Arturo’s curse isn’t really what this book is about. That’s just the tool being used to put Harry in a situation to be dealing with Thomas and the White Court of Vampires. Thomas’s older sister, Lara, is a performer in Arturo’s production after one of the other stars is incapacitated by the curse. Thomas’s youngest sister, Inari, is a production assistant on the set. After a showdown with Lara, that turns into a showdown with the Black Court forcing Harry and Lara to team up just moments after she tries to kill him, the whole gang heads back to the Raith estates to recover. Inari and Thomas were badly injured in the fight. Harry and Lara call a temporary truce, and Harry is horrified that Lara intentionally feeds Justine, Thomas’s girlfriend***, to Thomas at a time that she knows Thomas won’t be able to stop himself from killing her as he is hurt and not in control of the Hunger. I like the way that Butcher handles the White Court’s “Hunger.” It’s a parasite living inside of them that grants them supernatural powers, but also takes over and makes them into killers. Most of the White Court Vamps are also bad people, but Thomas is a good person and the struggle between him and his hunger is well written. Harry tries to intervene with Justine, telling her she doesn’t have to do this, but Justine tells Harry to tell Thomas she loves him, and she willingly feeds herself to him. In a show of legitimate character growth, Harry respects her decision and drops the matter. 

The next morning, Harry has some important epiphanies about himself. His relationship with Susan wasn’t necessarily less predatory than Thomas’s with Justine, though certainly less overtly so. It takes him a minute to get there, but when he does, he is able to have a real conversation with Thomas and show some impressive empathy. And that is where shit really starts to get bananas.

Earlier that morning Inari had been sent into Harry’s room by Lord Raith (Thomas, Lara, and Inari’s father) in a ploy set up by Lord Raith to have Harry killed by an unaware Inari. She’s young and hasn’t yet turned, but will the first time she has sex. At this point, Inari is unaware of that and is a victim in this scenario as well. Harry was protected by the White Court’s kryptonite: love. The last person he had been with was Susan and since he had been in love with her when Inari unconsciously put the psychic whammy on him and kissed him, his kiss burned her. On the premise of fearing another attack from Lord Raith, Thomas took Harry out of the mansion through an indirect route that took them through the portrait gallery. Harry was shocked to see a picture of his mother hanging with Lord Raith’s ex-wives. Thomas revealed that they are actually half-brothers (Thomas is older), and that he has a silver necklace identical to Harry’s own that was left to him by their mother. When they touch both necklaces at the same time, they receive a magic voicemail from their mother, which is the first time Harry has heard her voice. 

While coping with finding out he has family, Harry still has the Black Court threat hanging over his head. He had hired Kincaid, Karrin Murphy, and Ebenezar McCoy to help him wipe out the Black Vampire nest. Well, he didn’t hire Murphy and Ebenezar, but they are along for the ride. In the course of a spectacular fight with the Black nest, Harry discovers that Ebenezar has been hiding his actual role on the White Council from him. Ebenezar is an assassin allowed to break the Laws of Magic as he sees fit AND he was Harry’s mother’s teacher. Admittedly, it gets a little silly at some point that literally everyone knew Harry’s mother and no one talks about her, but I can overlook that. In the course of the fight at the Black nest, Harry’s hand is horribly burned to the point that his Dr. wants to amputate it. Harry declines and is deeply disturbed to find out from Bob that he had been wielding hellfire (which is forbidden and Harry doesn’t even know how to consciously do) during the fight. On top of that, there is one unburnt part of his hand in the shape of the sigil of the fallen angel that lives inside the coin Harry was tricked into picking up at the end of the last book. Up until that point, the coin hadn’t been addressed other than to note that Harry buried it under his lab. 

There’s one more boss fight to go when Harry has to break back into the Raith Mansion to rescue Thomas, who is going to be sacrificed by Lord Raith to power the curse that had been aimed at Arturo, but is now aimed at Harry. We find out that Raith had been behind the curse and manipulated Arturo’s ex-wives into casting it to ruin Arturo’s new porn production studio. That sounds sort of dumb when I write it, but it works in the book. Since the Raiths are psychic vampires that feed when having sex with their victims, it stands to reason that they would want to control the adult industry. Harry wins, obviously, and Raith is overpowered by Lara, who sort of teamed up with Harry in this. She wasn’t going to show public support for him in case he lost, but she did help some. We also find out that Justine survived the night with Thomas, but was mentally damaged on a major scale by it. Thomas pays off Harry’s debt to Kincaid with his savings, but as he is now cut off from the Raith fortune since Lara is maintaining the image of her father being in control and it would look bad if Wraith allowed Thomas to stick around, a newly poor Thomas moves in with Harry at the very end of the book. 

The last note I have on this book is that we’ve met Mouse, who is a spectacular character. He is a Foo Temple Dog that Harry rescued in the opening of the book. He was supposed to return to Tibet with a monk, but stowed away in Harry’s car and will be a regular part of the cast moving forward. Mouse is the best. He makes me want to get a great big wolfhound and name it Mouse. You shouldn’t read it until after you finish the books through Skin Game since it contains serious spoilers, but in Brief Cases, a collection of Dresden short stories, Mouse gets his own story, told in first person from his perspective. It’s really great. 

*Thomas was a pale, sparkly, sexy vampire before it was cool.

**I know it’s not funny when people get killed, but the frozen turkey falling out of an airplane and crushing a vampire that Harry redirected the curse at is some pretty high quality imagery.

***Well, sort of his girlfriend. It’s kind of hard to explain that here. You’ll understand if you’re reading along. If you’re not, the short version is that Thomas feeds off of Justine, and they clearly have strong feelings for each other, but in this book you learn that it would actually make Justine poisonous to Thomas if they fell in real love with each other. Which happens, obviously. But the main thing is that he has repeatedly demonstrated that he cares for her. 

YARN STUFF

Summer Court Socks, Clue 2

You can find Clue 1, along with additional information such as recommended yarn, needles, and gauge, at the bottom of THIS POST.

Inspired by the colors and imagery of the Summer Court of the Sidhe, the Summer Court Socks are the perfect knit for magical summer nights. Equally suited to taking tea in your palace’s garden on a lazy Sunday and to slipping into a set of mail boots before throwing yourself onto the frontline of an epic battle to decide the fate of human kind, these socks will never disappoint.

INSTRUCTIONS

Instructions given inside [brackets] are pattern repeats. The bracketed instructions should be repeated the number of times indicated immediately after the bracket. Ex: [K1P1] x4. Means you should work “K1, P1” four times, and [K1P1] to marker means to repeat “K1, P1” until you reach the next marker.

Click on the “Download” button below to get Chart 1.

LEG

R1-16: Repeat Chart 1 4(5, 6, 7) times around. 

Optional: Work the last 16 rounds again to achieve a longer leg on your sock, if desired. To work a short sock as shown in the sample, proceed to the instructions for rounds 17-23. 

R17-23: Work rows 1-7 of Chart 1 4(5, 6, 7) times around. Remove BoR when you finish round 7 (it will be placed again when working the gusset). Do not proceed to round 8 of the chart. 

I’ll see you back here next Wednesday with clue number three of the Summer Court Socks where we’ll turn the first heel and discuss Dead Beat by Jim Butcher!

~Megan-Anne

I apologize for the delay in posting this week. We lost power yesterday during a particularly bad storm and only just now got it back.

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