Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews

Magic Rises by Ilona AndrewsI decided I’d give myself a treat from my to be read pile this week because I’ve been working hard. What did I choose? A Kate Daniels novel. They tend to have the perfect blend between sassy dialogue and real emotions.

That said, Magic Rises held more of a punch than I was expecting mixed in amongst the laughs and quotable lines.

Kate styles herself as a badass fighter with difficulty connecting, and yet as usual, she manages to find the right words, though blunt ones, to help even those she doesn’t quite want to. And she’s always choosing to help others, an insane path considering the risks. It’s what makes her such a compelling character for me. She has every reason to be selfish, reasons that might even be for the good of all, but chooses not to. Time and again, she puts herself out there, calling it no choice, calling it for the contract, or whatever excuse she might come up with this time. What’s telling, so I won’t tell you the exact nature, is how she describes Curran and how he interacts with his world. That’s who she wants to be, and who she succeeds in being despite her absolute surety that she doesn’t have it in her.

And Curran is…well…Curran. He doesn’t change at the root, though he definitely suffers growing pains. He’s what I call a grounded person. He knows who he is, what he wants, and what he’s willing to do to get it. Sure, he doesn’t always tell people, and his way of going about things can be maddening, but eventually he spills his guts and everything makes sense. He’s a person to be taken on faith even when he does his best to shred that faith into the tatters left when he explodes into full beast form.

Ultimately, the Kate Daniels novels are people novels, hence why I start with a glimpse of the main characters. Magic Rises, though, takes it a step further by bringing forward the underlying story of Kate’s bloodline and taking it in interesting directions. This book had me laughing, but it also had me on the edge of tears. It’s powerful, fun, dramatic, and fascinating. If you haven’t tried the series, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Oh, and if you read the acknowledgements, they tell you to read the story at the end first. It’s what I call treats from the cutting room floor, and the note from the author is important (something I discovered when I got to the end of the book) because there is some overlap between that story and the information in the book, in part because Ilona Andrews attempts to cue new readers in on enough of the backstory to make each story readable by itself, or maybe just to make sure existing readers are brought up to speed when the new book comes out. Regardless, despite some repetition, it’s a great book with a wonderful short story at the end, that actually comes before this book begins.

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2 Responses to Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews

  1. Erin says:

    Huh. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read the fifth book in the series yet, but your description of Kate as an assassin threw me. Fighter, yes. Ex-merc, formerly with the Order — sure. Assassin? Maybe I’ll just stop with the ones I’ve already read.

    • Margaret McGaffey Fisk says:

      Hmm, not wanting to mislead. That’s how she considers herself, and always has. She fights with that in her nature. It’s not her job description, like fighter, merc, etc. are, but rather that she’s been trained to kill. And no, don’t stop. This is not an assassin book :). Heck, I’ll even go so far as to change the wording of the review :D.

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