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
