Year of the Dragon (Changeling Sisters #3) by Heather Heffner

Raina Alvarez has never been fully accepted by her family, since she was the result of her mother cheating with a Korean businessman - who also is a Celestial Dragon

And now her father has found her in time for her to compete, as the Water Dragon of Spring, to become the next Celestial Dragon of the East. A being of great power that would save the world from disaster and shape a new age

But there are old enemies of the Celestial Dragons who have long memories and grudges against Raina’s new found father – to say nothing of dark fell powers rising in the West.

Those powers are also on Citlalli’s mind – newly alpha of the Seoul Wolfpack; a role that is far from easy with her pack divided, her desperate wish to have a real life as a normal girl. And then there’s her shattered soul; a terrible secret that makes all of that near impossible.

This book has a lot of callbacks to all the previous books – including the short story Year of the Boar. I really appreciate that – I love a series that feels like it is getting deeper and richer and stronger with every passing book – it gives a series so much more depth.

But at times I do feel like I’m getting overwhelmed by a lot of characters who I can’t keep much track of – especially since there seems to be a lot of characters (I kind of forgot that Una existed). Part of that is because there are a lot of powerful, excellent female characters each with their own storylines which touches each others but isn’t necessarily all dependent on each other. Citlali’s story is very different from Raina’s story and Yu Li and Nona have their own story.  And each of their own stories has their own relevant characters and conflicts and issues even as they are all linked – it still adds up to a large cast and very few characters that are just there to be tokens or tools.

It does feel a little overwhelming – bit it’s overwhelming because all the characters are characters. Because no-one is there to be written off, because no-one is just there to be an extra, because everyone has a history and an opinion and their own conflicts and issues and difficulties. It’s full – but it’s full of reality and development and complex world building and conflicting and complementing personal motives. You have to pay attention and it’s not an easy read, but it’s worth doing.

It’s interesting to see Raina’s draconic siblings all have their storylines and complexities – and no-one is the designated bad guy. Heesu is young and joyful and the most unconflicted (which, in many ways, means I like her the most). Ankor has his major issues with being a disappointment to his father due to a terrible accident with which he can bond with Citlali. Sun Bin at first comes off as a complete mean girl but in reality has major issues with her father’s sexism and homophobia: always looking down on her for being both a daughter and for loving another woman. They’re all very human and have faced very real pressures.

I also like Raina’s issues because they’re very real and neither make her a saint not make her bitter – but are a very human, complex reaction. Her resentment and envy towards Citlali and what she’s achieved and living in her shadow. Her reluctance to embrace her draconic family when she has no connection to them. Her history with her family due to being blamed as the one who broke the family up as living proof of their mother’s infidelity. There’s a lot of conflict and difficult feelings there with Raina and none of them are supernatural – it’s excellently done

Year of the Boar: Tica (Changeling Sisters #1.5) by Heather Heffner

Tica has struggles to fight – bone cancer has left some devastating effect on her life and her future. Her dreams are severely set back and she has to fight hard to be someone other than “the cancer girl”

But there’s another struggle looming – the cursed Vampyre Prince Khyber has come to Hawai’i with a mission: he wants to die. And the keys to doing so lie in recruiting Tica to the fight to protect Hawai’i and the spirit world from desperate spiritual attack.

This book did an excellent job of filling in a few of the gaps – there are characters I read about in Year of the Tiger that I felt had a lot going on that I had missed. Which was true – but the elegance of the series is that I didn’t need to know Rafael’s backstory to understand Year of the Tiger, the battles that were fought or why Rafael felt the way he did. It was clear that Rafael had a major life above and beyond what Citlali saw, and that wasn’t a bad thing

Which is something else this story does excellently, we continue the whole metaplot of The Changeling Sisters series but also get to exp

I think, perhaps, this would have been improved without the focus on Khyber, to be honest. I think it would have been better served with a less involved vampire – or even no vampires at all (do the taking over dark spirits need the direct vampire presence to be an issue?). It would have done better at giving the idea that this is a battle across the globe with different warriors struggling against them. It would expand the universe.

But it still did expand that – because Khyber was pretty much unnecessary to the main plot of this book which was definitely, overwhelmingly Tica’s story. Which I also love because it sets another champion up who is every bit as awesome as Citlali

And Tica is awesome. She’s passionate and determined. She isn’t perfect and definitely has some painful, difficult moments with her friends and certainly with her mother. But she’s extremely knowledgeable and tough and faces both personal battles, accepts the vastness of the supernatural and absorbs and adapts to it well.

Her story is really well written, excellently paced as it matches development of her character and the world, her difficult, painful relationships, her very painful struggle as well as the action involved in fighting to save the spirit world and fight off the dark spirits (and the dark Spirits of Plague are horrendous – and much better villains than the vampires that seem almost clumsily inserted to the rest of this awesome story) as well as a lot of Hawai’ian mythology

Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters #2) By Heather Heffner

The war between the weres and the vampires grows in intensity and Citlalli is torn in how to proceed – does she obediently follow the were alpha’s plans, even as he keeps her in the dark? Does she join Rafael on his destructive quest for vengeance- but how many will die following his path? Or does she take a chance and run for her own priority – saving her sisters – even if it means meeting the vampire queen on her own turf?

While Raina continues her precarious existence in the vampire court. She has few – and decreasing – allies and an ever growing amount of enemies. She has forged an alliance with Khyber, the queen’s oldest son, but how sure can she be that she can trust him? But her own awareness of herself and her past may be giving her a whole new weapon to fight with

I don’t know whether it’s because of the gap between reading this book and the last book, but I found some elements of this book lost me. It’s just so huge, we have the supernatural world, the back story of the vampires, the nature of Citlalli’s many divided soul, different shapeshifter groups, magic and spirits and Uma and dark spirits and the Fox and the man’s lantern… it’s rare for me to want a recap but I would have appreciated here  - a recap or more detailed explanation. Or maybe just a slightly slower pace

Because while the first book took a long time to get started, this book felt like we were plunged into the deep end and expected to run. In almost no time we go from reeling and adapting to the last book to throwing ourselves into the action of this one. The war is here, the plot against the vampires is coming to a head. Fights! Drama! High emotion! Conflict! It’s an excellent roller coaster of action and tension which just doesn’t give me much time to catch my breath and get my bearing as we’re pulled along. Just little things like the nature of spirit world, the identity of various ghosts, a reminder of the shapeshifter hierarchy, the nature of Maya’s many forms, Una’s role, maybe even a little time to get used to Raina and Citlalli’s differing POVs since Rain is changing so much.

At the same time there are elements of the plot that are distracted. Citlalli takes some time to spend with the lantern seller and I,m not entirely sure what it achieves (or how she’s able to magically divine his cure after such a brief meeting). We have the fox running around causing chaos that could probably be better served in a series of short stories – though it does serve to remind us that just because the vampires and Maya are the main enemy doesn’t mean they’re the only problem.

I think this rapid pacing, large number of characters and lots of action confuses me a little because the world is so wide and rich. There’s a lot of research, a lot of legends and a lot of work gone into building this world and incorporating so many different elements of mythology that we so rarely see incorporated into Urban Fantasy stories, making it very different from anything I’ve read before

I did like to see some humanising of Citlali’s mother – she’s often the harsh authority figure to be railed against and blamed. It’s nice to see more of her – her strictness covers her concern and genuine love. And her compassion – refusing to let Una live alone when she realises she has no parents. She’s strict, she has rules, but she also has a lot of love and a lot of hard history behind her

Year of the Wolf (Changeling Sisters #1) by Heather Heffner

Citlalli and her family have come to South Korea to join their mother after their oldest sister, Marisol, disappeared after slowly weakening over a long period.

In Seoul they face many difficulties acclimatising and fitting in with the culture around them – and they have not achieved the safety they sought. Raina, Citlalli’s sister starts to fall prey to the same symptoms as Marisol

Desperate not to lose another sister, and frustrated by medicine’s inability to cure her, Citlalli pursues more and more mystical avenues to find an answer – and finds far more than she imagined. Ghosts and spirits, creatures of legend – and vampires, slow, life draining vampires and their enemies, the werewolves.

She’s in over her head and she needs to learn quickly – but Citlalli is determined that the vampire queen will not take another of her sisters, no matter what she must do to stop her.

When this story started I found it incredible disjointed and confusing. The chronology moves back and forth – we see Citlalli in the past coming to South Korea interspaced, lots of flashback that has happened to her and her family interspaced with the present. They’re not clearly labelled, we don’t always know if we’re in the past or the present and I found it extremely confusing and really not to my taste. It was a real pain for me and there was a moment when I nearly put the book down because it was too much work to follow it.

This part of the book also coincides with a very long preamble to the story. There’s foreshadowing to the supernatural, but it is just foreshadowing and it feels like an extremely long run up to the actual meat of the story. It’s frustrating and, again, made it a hard book to get into and tempted me to stop.

But once you get past that original barrier, the book opens up considerably. Not only does it improve, but it improves sufficiently that it is more than worth battling past that beginning shakiness, because it opens up into a truly original and excellent story that is definitely worth a read.

The story itself draws heavily on Korean mythology and elements of east-Asian mythology and beliefs. I can’t venture to say how accurate it was or how well it got it or how much different traditions were mixed up – or even what were western inserts – because I’m not nearly well versed enough to make that judgement. I will say that there was a sense of considerable research- places were named, streets were named, areas were referred to, there was a lot of use of the Korean language (and the little I knew seemed accurate, same goes to the relatively small elements of mythology I recognised) but all of this comes from a place of profound ignorance on my part. I can’t say if it was authentic, only that there was a definite amount of research going on.