I'm Crazy About Kate Daniels! Mega-Review Marathon Time!

I love Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels Series so much I fell into a reading marathon. Did I take notes as I hurried from one book to the next? No. It was a blast! So here's a hardcore review marathon. You can catch my review of Magic Bites (book 1) HERE.

5 STARS!! In Magic Burns (book 2) Kate is somehow even more badass than ever before. She gets a phone call for a job which leads to nonstop action. There is so much magic in this installment I waited for my usual reaction of zoning out. That did not happen. I also waited for more Curran and that did happen. Kate runs into a couple kids who managed to get themselves smack dab in the middle of the melee and we get to see our favorite herione's maternal side, uh, more like favorite violent auntie side. We also get to watch Kate fight her instincts to hold everyone at arm's reach. She's an emotional, caring, homicidal girl. I like that.

5 STARS!! Magic Strikes (book 3) pulls us into the world where Kate has connections and people she worries about. Part of her always wants to flee because she was raised to stay safe, aloof, hidden, and lethal. In this installment we're neck deep in mysterious deaths, magic, and gore because where there's magic there's weird shit. I'm telling you Ilona Andrews has an M.C. Escher sort of mind, but not black and white, blood red. The best part of this story is watching Kate and Curran interact with each other. The other best part is the action as always. I can't believe it, but I get giddy when the swords come out to play!

5 STARS!! Magic Bleeds (book 4) has some of the creepiest, uckiest (not a word) scenes ever! There were scenes where I shook my head, "No more, Kate! Look away. Stop looking. Stop thinking about what you're looking at. Please!" If you ever watched the movie Legion with Paul Bettany and the guy we thought was dead started bloating while restrained somehow (can't remember that part on account of shaking my head and closing my eyes). Well, Kate never backs down or closes her eyes. She's amazing! And scared all the time. My heart raced through the whole story. There's romantic drama along the lines of teen romance shows, but I needed the relief from the death. There is also the most awesome foe, scene stealing, I'm telling you!

5 STARS!! Magic Slays starts off kind of slow for all of four or five pages, then bam. Vampire on the loose. This series has the best vamps because they're just mindless fiends controlled by a navigator. They crawl up walls and open their mouths only to have the voice of the person controlling them come out. Freaking scary. A loose vamp is very bad. But it doesn't happen often, especially with a Master of the Dead. Enter Kate and her sword. This installment wrenched my heart this way and that. Every time the world hurt Kate my breath hitched because that's how deep you fall into her story. One of the neatest aspects was the strange mix of Middle Ages meets 24 (the TV series).

4 STARS! Magic Rises (book 6) was what I call an "on location" book. Most of our favorite series set in a main location has an installment where the heroine packs up and travels for the majority of the story. Thing is I always end up getting homesick. I want the setting I've grown to know. I want the familiar faces. The other new thing was all the humor. Kate is a funny girl with all her why me's and her lack of social skills, but I laughed out loud many times the first few chapters. It worried me that everyone was going to die. I'm not sure if that was a device to build up the worry or a device to make it up to us or just the mood the author was in. I also got lost in the back story because there was so much of it, pages of it. Names and lore and I felt like I was in class with the air conditioning on high. There was also a great deal of relationship and insecurity drama that I was frustrated for a good portion of the book. I loved the battles...so much! I loved one of the bad guys...so much again. Curran made me growl. Kate made me shriek. Andrews made me cry.