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.
