booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

It feels like it's confusing infodumping with characterization, and I'm not enjoying the story.

Not enjoying the story, don't like the main character and the narrative style.

Opens by discussing a medical topic in a way I found uncomfortable.

I cannot stand the narrator and can’t read a whole book from their perspective

Andrea is trying to be over Raphael, truly she is, but a murder in one of his reclamation sites forces them to talk to each other after a long silence. 

Andrea feels very different from Kate. Despite this being set in the same place with most of the secondary characters shared with the main series, Andrea's narration makes this stand out from the other books. Her focus is much more on the short term and her worries are distinct. She's also still affected from the torturous level of bullying which she endured as a child, and this deals somewhat with the lingering affects of that trauma. 

I was all set to highly recommend this, but it has several instances of ableist language which comes out of nowhere and seemed very dissonant with the rest of the book. I do like the story a lot and this isn't enough to justify skipping the book, but it did dampen my enjoyment enough to affect my rating. 

This is oddly positioned as a sequel, since it has a different protagonist from the main Kate Daniels books and is set directly after the fifth book (MAGIC SLAYS). Previous books established the turbulent state of Andrea's stalled relationship with Raphael and her attempts to avoid joining the Pack, and these two threads are continued and brought to a new status quo here. Because it's not directly in line with the main series, most of what it leaves for later is the question of what these changes will mean when Kate resumes narrating. In the main storyline Andrea begins investigating four mysterious deaths at one of Raphael's reclamation sites, this and its associated plot points are introduced and resolved within the book. Andrea has a very different narrative voice from Kate, something which is made obvious in the scene which appears from each of their perspectives in this volume: first from Andrea's side in the main novel, then from Kate's in the included novella (MAGIC GIFTS). 

It wouldn't make much sense to someone who tried to start here without reading any of the previous books. It relies heavily on books four and five from the main series in terms of worldbuilding and Andrea's relationship with Raphael. It does a pretty good job of providing a refresher and to characterize already established events from Andrea's perspective rather than Kate's. There were several instances where the reader can know more than Andrea does because of what Kate conveyed in the first five books, and several more where Andrea provides more information on things which Kate either didn't know about or which the other books only lightly discussed. 

The main plot forces Andrea to handle several stressful arenas of her life which would naturally have a lot of overlap, but which she was thus far attempting to compartmentalize (with varying degrees of success). Her relationship with Raphael is implicitly connected to her identity as a shapeshifter, and her attempt to treat those as two separate things contributed to their relationship's hiatus. Her work at Cutting Edge with Kate means that Raphael ends up as her client, further complicating things. I like how things are handled, the various solutions have a lot of synergy without feeling too neatly wrapped up. I wish the series gave Andrea more books of her own, but since this appears to be the only one I'll happily take it. 

Cutting Edge Investigations gets their first client, and a mission to fix what the Red Guard couldn't handle.  

Kate and Curran have put (and continue to put) a lot of work into their relationship, and it shows. There's a scene involving another character's failed attempt at seduction which forms a counterpoint to their dynamic, as well as showing what it looked like early on for minor characters who weren't witnesses to the actual events. Andrea and Raphael are on the outs at the moment because of events in MAGIC BLEEDS, some of which feels positioned for the spinoff book, GUNMETAL MAGIC, which stars Andrea and takes place immediately after MAGIC SLAYS.

This series excels at describing the post-Shift world as it is now, with details to anchor the reader while keeping the perspective fully that of a character who didn't experience the pre-Shift world. Kate knows about how things used to be in many cases because her every waking moment is surrounded by the detritus of the world which was, and when the tech is up she gets of glimpse of was (depending on income level) a world of modern convenience which many could enjoy. She has to pay bills, worry about city regulations on occasion, and decide what level of gore on her clothes necessitates getting cleaned up right now versus what can wait. There's a description towards the end where Kate explains the current state of what used to be the Atlanta airport. The whole description conveys how important it used to be, and how utterly the Shift destroyed it. Her tone is, if anything, similar to how she'd tell some currently relevant but ultimately unimportant piece of her backstory. 

The shapeshifters are ableist, specifically but not exclusively around physical strength and prowess. It's embedded in their society in ways, small and large, which have been obvious from the very first book in the series. This has in-universe explanations related to the Keep being relatively recent and shapeshifters tending to live in small family groups with some degree of isolation from other society. Playing off of events at the end of MAGIC BLEEDS, MAGIC SLAYS calls this out and makes it explicit that at least some of the ableism was intended as part of the worldbuilding. Curran has some choice words regarding the string of challenges Kate had to fight while he was incapacitated in the previous book, and it's affected the way he approaches leading the Pack. 

This series rarely closes off anything definitively, but this finally resolves the tension between Julie's desire to not be at boarding school and Kate's desire to keep her safe. There's a new storyline  with the main problem for this book (Kate's first client at her new building) getting both introduced and resolved. It continues several things from the last book, including but not limited to Kate's new office, Andrea's tensions with the boudas, and Kate and Curran navigating their new mated life in the Keep. There are several things left for later, most of the interpersonal entanglements and relationships will clearly continue. Kate is still the narrator, and she's changed a lot in ways that make her narrative voice feel a bit different from the start of the series, but the changes have been gradual enough that it's a gentle progression and she still sounds like herself overall. 

The first four books introduced at least one major magical faction per book, and in this one they're all needed for one big thing towards the end. While the main storyline is explained well enough that it could probably make sense on its own, the finale's "and now we call in the whole team" vibe means that if you don't know what happened in the other books it could feel like a deus ex machina with all these heavy hitters and it might not be satisfying. For anyone who did read the other books, it's more of a culmination of a lot of blood, sweat, and more blood that Kate has poured into her work thus far, with excellent payoff for the extended setup. 

While MAGIC BLEEDS has a slightly flashier conflict, MAGIC SLAYS is more impactful because of the new understanding it establishes between the characters in and around the race to stop the city from being massacred. The stakes are higher and the emotional intensity demanded by those stakes feels appropriate. The earlier books tended to have an implicit threat to the rest of the city if they failed completely, but this time there's a different quality to the threat because it involves a device which is (once it warms up) capable of an insta-kill where the radius for the area of effect is measured in miles. 

The backstory involves a deal with hell and also aliens, then (at least in the first fifth of the book) it's a contemporary story about a trans kid who has run away from home, with hints of what feels like a slow burn sapphic romance. To me, it feels like the skipped the (extremely interesting) hell story, involves the most mundane bits possible on the alien story, and I'm not in the right headspace for a transphobia story. The combination as a whole doesn't fit what I want to read right now, so I stopped. I only tried reading it because of the Hugo nomination, since the description alone was enough to tell me this probably wasn't going to be a book I'd like. 

I don’t like the worldbuilding and couldn’t get into the book. The worldbuilding felt uneven, explaining things which wouldn’t actually need to be explained if they were true, while not explaining the kinds of things which would be fascinating to know.