Text Junkie

On Saturday, I finished Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews and then promptly read Magic Burns on Sunday.

It took about half the book for me to get interested in Magic Bites. The author has created a weird, wacky world which I generally like; however, in this case it took her quite a bit of time to fully explain the world. This is book 1 of the series, but I felt like I was missing a prequel.

She made statements of fact like "the tech fell" and "the magic hit". It took me half of the book to realize that magic grew in strength and then all technology items (light bulbs, cars, etc.) stop functioning. An hour later, in the "time of tech", magic is still present, but it isn't as strong and so the technology rules.

If it had just been this book, I probably wouldn't have picked up another book by Ilona Andrews, but the second book had the same characters, so I had to see what was going to happen to them. I liked the character that is the leader of the shape shifters "Beast Lord", I didn't like the vampires at all.

In this world, vampires are brainless undead and the Master of the Dead "pilots" them. He sits in his secured location and runs the vampires like playstation. I didn't really get how one gets to be the Master of the Dead. I don't know if the master is a vampire or not. There were 200 - 300 year old vampires who didn't think for themselves. It just wasn't clear.

All in all, I'll read another book with the same characters, but I won't recommend them to anyone else.