I really love this series. Really. It's inventive, unique, filled with awesome characters and environs. Year of the Tiger wraps up the story begun in Year of the Wolf. The Alvarez sisters are fighting their way through major drama and angst as they seek to save each other and the Spirit World.
I love that the main characters are POC (people of color) and that the landscape is doubly othered. There's Seoul (South Korea) and Spirit!Seoul. We get closer to the characters (Khyber and Raina being the most interesting), and we get to watch the characters get closer to each other. One of the things that I loved most was Citlalli's continuing evolution. There wasn't a lot in this book. This is definitely an action centered story, but the idea of the fracturing souls and how Citlalli deals with the ways she is changing is thematically intrinsic. This is a novel about duality and it pops up all over the place: good versus evil, were versus vampire, real world versus spirit world, and then the gray areas between all of those things. (That might be the most interesting thing about those kinds of opposing extremes, and Heffner is obviously interested in exploring the middle grounds.) Unfortunately, there are some technical/structural issues that distract and detract from what is a super promising concept.
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I love that the main characters are POC (people of color) and that the landscape is doubly othered. There's Seoul (South Korea) and Spirit!Seoul. We get closer to the characters (Khyber and Raina being the most interesting), and we get to watch the characters get closer to each other. One of the things that I loved most was Citlalli's continuing evolution. There wasn't a lot in this book. This is definitely an action centered story, but the idea of the fracturing souls and how Citlalli deals with the ways she is changing is thematically intrinsic. This is a novel about duality and it pops up all over the place: good versus evil, were versus vampire, real world versus spirit world, and then the gray areas between all of those things. (That might be the most interesting thing about those kinds of opposing extremes, and Heffner is obviously interested in exploring the middle grounds.) Unfortunately, there are some technical/structural issues that distract and detract from what is a super promising concept.
( Read more... )