Thursday, July 23, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Haunted Heroine by Sarah Kuhn


Haunted Heroine is the latest novel by author Sarah Kuhn, and the fourth novel (and 5th installment) in her Heroine Complex series.  I have absolutely loved this series, which began with "Heroine Complex" several years ago, and was absolutely thrilled to hear that it would be continuing beyond the original trilogy.  Featuring Asian American superheroines in San Francisco who have to deal with their own anxieties, sudden and surprising romances (with some fun steamy sex scenes) - to go along with fantastic endlessly quotable dialogue and fun action sequences, the series was just absolutely a blast and so much fun, and I binge read each within a single day.  So I actually preordered this one rather than wait for it to come out from the library, and finished it within 14 hours of it downloading to my kindle app at midnight.

And the result is.....still fun, but a step down from its predecessors.  The book moves the setting to a private women only liberal arts school, and as such features classic college tropes, and is very fun in that regard - and remains nearly as quotable as its predecessor.  It also moves the perspective of the novel back to Evie (our protagonist from the original novel) and there it's a little less successful, with Evie's new emotional journey and character development feeling kind of duplicative of where it was in the prior novels.  Again this is still a really enjoyable novel that fans of the series will enjoy and I look forward to seeing the next novel (presumably shifting perspective back to Aveda), the series just has set some damn high standards.

Note:  Spoilers for the original trilogy are inevitable, but I don't know why you'd skip to this book when the others are so good.  Go read those first.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
A few months in to her pregnancy, Evie Tanaka's seemingly perfect life is showing some cracks.  Not only does she internally worry about whether she can really do this - to have a baby and care for it and be a good mother - but her husband Nate has seemingly withdrawn, becoming overprotective above all else.  And despite her pregnancy making her increasingly horny, Nate is refusing to give her sexual relief!  So when Evie weirdly gets an email inviting to a reunion at her old women's college - despite her being a drop-out and not an alum - Aveda convinces Evie to go to try and get a little vacation out of it....and naturally Aveda insists on coming along.

But when the two arrive at Morgan College, a small Women's (and NB's) College in an oasis in Oakland, they find things are out of the ordinary: the college's usually harmless hauntings have started to attack people and Evie's wanders into one such attack in person, resulting in a student telling Evie "don't trust them".  Naturally the only thing the two superheroines can do in such a situation is to go undercover as grad student TAs on campus to investigate the mystery!  But as they do, Evie will come across the professor she had a fling with in college, the one who set her on the path to dropping out, and will begin to have further doubts about whether she did the right thing back then....just as the danger of the ghosts begins to take a real turn......
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I want to make this clear again before I go further with this review:  Haunted Heroine is a fun enjoyable novel, with some great dialogue, really enjoyable main and side characters, and a fun sex scene and a half (kinda).  I liked this novel.  And yet I have a feeling this review is going to bog down in negatives, so I don't want to lose sight of that.

Each novel of the original Heroine trilogy focused upon a different protagonist (Heroine Complex = Evie, Heroine Worship = Aveda/Annie, Heroine's Journey = Bea) as they faced supernatural/demon related threats and had to deal with their own emotional struggles and romance through it all.  Haunted Heroine is the first novel therefore to return to a previously seen protagonist: in this case, Evie Tanaka.  Evie's sort of been the main character of the entire first trilogy even when she wasn't the main protagonist - in book 1 (Her book), the story was about her learning she didn't need to hold in her emotions, and that she could and should maintain the confidence of the kickass person (and heroine) she truly was, and that in asserting herself she could find happiness.  In book 2, while our main perspective and journey was focused upon Aveda, Evie still was on the side struggling to assert herself in the face of Aveda's reckless assertiveness, and the two learned to work together as friends and teammates better.  In book 3 (Heroine's Journey), again the focus may have been on Bea, Evie's decade younger sister, but Evie was still there in focus as she struggled to deal with issues relating to her pregnancy and fears that she didn't raise Bea right - with Bea and Evie's relationship being a key part of the book.  The emotional struggles - more so than the action packed struggles with demons - of each of the characters have always been the core of this series, and Evie's in particular has always remained central.

So while part of Evie's new emotional journey here, where she has to get over her "failure" in college and her fears that she failed Bea as a parental figure and that she won't be a good parent to her coming child, is very well done....it can't help but feel a bit duplicative of what came before.  In particular, Evie's fears about how well she handled parenting Bea seems completely redundant, with that having been a central issue of Heroine's Journey, where it was not only resolved for the moment, but the two characters also have been doing online therapy together to further resolve them since the end of book 3!  Obviously that isn't to say that Evie still can't feel some anxiety over whether she did the right thing with Bea, but it's bizarre how central a worry it is for both her and others to pick at in this novel: we just did this!

The rest of Evie's emotional journey works better - obviously with her abandoning father and Nate being so overprotective it's natural for her to worry about whether she can be a good parent, and Evie having doubts about her college experiences can make sense (although again she sort of got over those in book 1!).  And the experiences Evie and Aveda have as undercover college students on campus are fun to read, complete with the necessary late night snacking and partying you'd expect.  The quartet of college students the duo find themselves connected to are all fun, and while there aren't quite as many fun action scenes - or even sex scenes as we only get one full sex scene in this novel (although it's really good as usual) - as in the prior novels, it's all a lot of fun to read.  But since the emotional punch of each novel, usually dealt with by a 75% of the way through personal revelation in the past books, feels more than a bit "been there done that" this time around, it made this book stand out a bit less, and oddly makes me want to reread the other books rather than this one.

In short: Haunted Heroine is still a very fun novel, and I still love the series' main characters, its amazing dialogue (yeah the dialogue is great and quotable again), and the new setting provides for plenty of new fun - so if you loved the rest of the series, like I did, you'll enjoy this.  It's just a slight step back from the prior trilogy's incredibly high standard though, so be forewarned.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)