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Before the Romance Takeover Readathon started, I needed to get through my Kate Daniels books for January! This month's assigned reads starts with book 8, Magic Shifts. We are almost at the end of this popular series by Ilona Andrews. The readalong is hosted by Stef, Heather and Megan! I was able to use this for the prompt borrowed from a friend or the library for the first board of Winter's Kiss. I also applied it to the Heaving Bosoms' 2022 Reading Embrace prompt Keep Being a Badass.
Kate and Curran are officially on their own and working on making more business for Cutting Edge. Now that Curran doesn't have the Pack to run, he's missing the challenge of making it all work. When Jim, the new Beast Lord, offers Curran the Pack's shares in the Mercenary Guild in exchange for flat out money in buying out some of his investments, Curran and Kate are not excited. The Guild isn't doing well and starting to fall apart. When one of the council members is rude to Curran, he changes his mind and the Guild will be his new project. When fellow shifter and guild member Eduardo goes missing, Kate and Curran start investigating. A lot of little cases start popping up and eventually they all connect to one big threat.
Oh my gosh, we got Kate and Curran working together for pretty much the whole book. I was so excited to see them grow and adapt to their new life and loved just seeing them work together on cases. Also, this book absolutely wrecked me in the middle. This is a little bit of a spoiler, but Kate has a worse battle then usual and ends up having a bunch of mini strokes. She almost dies. I repeat, she almost dies. I was so scared. I know that there are two more books, and the series name is Kate Daniels, but this isn't a romance. There's not guaranteed HEA, although I do think the series does have one. I was so wrecked and upset and couldn't put it down because I just had to get to the next magic wave so Doolittle could try to heal Kate. I don't quite know if this will come into play in the next couple books, but I do think that we've been slowly seeing Kate get injured more and more lately. I know that's partly due to her gaining more power and taking on stronger creatures/villains, but at the same time the power she's gaining isn't making her less human.
When Kate was in the hospital we got to see a lot of emotion from Curran and this was a more romantic scene between them. Seeing the connection between them was so beautiful and heart-wrenching. I also loved seeing Curran step up and be firm with Julie that no matter what happened to Kate, she's his daughter too. To get away from the more depressing part of the story, we got new mythos! This time was middle-east mythos and dealing with djinns. I love seeing more of the world and how Ilona Andrews seems to incorporate so many different religions and mythologies so seamlessly. I just can't believe how good they are at world building and making everything fit so naturally. I don't really have any nitpicks with this one except for the sudden emotional turmoil, but that just goes to show how emotionally invested I can get with books, especially when I'm with them for more than 8 books.
I'm super intrigued to see what happens as we wrap up the series. I'm trying to stay away from blurbs, but I do know that outside of books 9 and 10, we do have two .5 books. The 8.5 is a Julie and Derek book and I believe at the last live show they said that the 9.5 is Hugh's POV. I'm certainly intrigued there, especially since I really enjoyed his character until he went psycho crazy and tried to kill everyone. We'll see what happens. I'm excited to get to the end and see how this all ends up, but at the same time I'm also sad it's almost ending. At least we have the Aurelia Ryder spin-off that's set around Julie!
Have you read Magic Shifts?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STATISTICS: Magic Shifts, Ilona Andrews, 5-star, 1 day, eBook, 375 pages, published in 2016, traditionally published
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