SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Holiday Heroine by Sarah Kuhn: https://t.co/W3NNmGhaea
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 31, 2022
Short Review: 9 out of 10 - The final Heroine book returns to Bea Tanaka, Asian-American superheroine, as she tries to avoid turning into supervillainy while saving both her holiday cheer and..
1/3
Short Review (cont): her family, friends, all she loves, and even herself from killer Kaiju, demons, and maybe a little time traveling. Incredibly fun just as usual for this series, which I love so much.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 31, 2022
2/3
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 30, 2022 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Holiday Heroine is the sixth and final novel (not counting the one novella) in Sarah Kuhn's "Heroine Complex" series, as series which I have absolutely fallen in love with over the last few years. The series, which began with Heroine Complex (Reviewed Here), features a trio of Asian American superheroines in a San Francisco that faced an unsuccessful demon invasion from another dimension....which resulted in some people getting superpowers and demonic forces possessing odd choices of normal objects - birthday cakes, wedding dresses, microphones, etc. - and causing havoc. In this story we have our three major heroines, Evie, Aveda (Annie) and Bea, as they kick demon butt, deal with their own insecurities about their own lives and their romances, have steamy romances, and form their own families in their own very different ways. The books are incredibly incredibly fun, at times incredibly sexy (with great sex scenes), and each deals with one of the main characters as they struggle with new circumstances and anxieties as they grow and change.
Holiday Heroine is the second of these books to follow Bea Tanaka, maybe my favorite of the heroines, who is almost a YA heroine....she's college aged roughly unlike her older sister and friend, wants to prove herself as independent at times, and is just plain fun in how she approaches life...which got her in trouble when her empathy superpower turned into emotion/mind-altering, led her to being manipulated by a demon into almost supervillainous actions like sacrificing the girl her best friend was starting to like all the way back in Book 3, Heroine's Journey. I loved Heroine's Journey, and it turns out, I loved this second Bea novel, as she deals with a long-distance relationship, what her heart truly wants in her relationship with Sam, Killer Kaiju, time traveling, and the holiday (Christmas) spirit that she loves so much...This is apparently the last installment there will be in the series, and if so, this is a great sendoff - super fun, sexy (oh yeah), and just charming in one last ride with the old characters I've come to love and the new ones here who are just as charming as the rest.
More specifics after the jump. Fair warning: Spoiler for the first five books may be below, but this is not really the type of series to be affected too much by you having too much foreknowledge.
------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Bea Tanaka thought going to Maui to join Doc Kai's Demonology Research Group would be exactly what she needed - a chance to prove her independence and her generall all around adultness separate from her beloved sister Evie (and might-as-well-be sister Aveda), where she could explore her own emotion based superpowers and her love of scientific experimentation (and creative thinking) in a cool hip new place. But while she's loved the people she's met on the Island, things have been far harder than Bea expected - the demon threat on Maui is more tourist-hallucinations than actually real and her powers (especially after a recent combo spell with Scott and Aveda) have been kind of out of control, leading her to be constantly afraid of using her mind-altering abilities for supervillainous purposes....like luring annnoying tourists away from her own favorite food spots.
And then there's being away from her boyfriend Sam (now very occupied with taking care of his parents) and best friend, leaving her with no one she feels comfortable talking about this whole thing. She's responded to this all by limiting her communication with her San Fran friends to cards about her love - and I mean LOVE - of Christmas and various Christmas movies, but it hasn't helped her insecurity and fear that everything is falling apart in her attempt to have a normal happy and totally non-supervillainous life.
But when Bea starts seeing first small kaiju, she finds herself drastically thrown for a loop - she's lost a week of time, during which Sam claims they broke up, and things just don't seem to make sense. And then a giant one shows up to threaten Bea and her family...and Bea finds herself soon caught in a loop of Christmas-esque moments where something has gone seriously seriously wrong. This isn't the holiday rom-com she imagined for herself, and if Bea isn't careful, it's going to end with somebody seriously hurt....and Bea utterly heartbroken.....
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In another writer's hands, this plot setup could be frustrating - here's another protagonist heroine who is bottling inside her feelings (like the prior two books' protagonists) when she should be willing to trust in the love of her loed ones, who is going to get herself into trouble by not seeking others' advice until finally trusting in those people helps her avert mere disaster. But while there are some elements of that here, there's a lot else, and Kuhn spices it up with some fun characters, zany new powers, and amazing situations. We have Kaiju, Christmas movies, fun new characters with their own quirks, scientific reasoning, and oh yeah, some real real hot sexy moments. And Kuhn even acknowledges the repetitiveness in ways that both make sense and subvert your expectations, with a moment between Evie, Aveda, and Bea at the end that is so perfect it just ties the last three books in this series altogether. And so she manages to tell a great story that directly attacks the notion that women of color have to be resilient and sacrificing for the good of others....in a hell of a fun way.
I mean, I shouldn't lose track of the fact that this is a book about a girl with superpowers trying to save her loved ones from Kaiju, traveling possibly through time repeatedly to save the existence of said loved ones, all with some zany zany Christmas spirit along the way throughout both San Fran and Maui. That's there too. And it's why Kuhn's book can be both so fun and so poignant, with great characters and themes, and just makes me so happy to have enjoyed the ride six books and a novella deep.
Holiday Heroine returns the story to Bea, last seen in Heroine's Journey. In that book, Bea struggled with the fact that she desired to be a heroine even though her siblings feared to let her in the dangers of the job, struggled with her always feeling a bit alone with her dad having left her and Evie and her mom having died young, and with the temptations to use her emotion/mind-altering powers in dark selfish ways to get what she wanted...something exploited by the demon at the end of that. In the end of that book, she came to realize that she had a family who loved her, as well as friends - and one boyfriend she romantically loved in Sam, and that she didn't need to be a heroine alongside her sibling-figures...and her sibling figures also learned that she had to be allowed to also take risks on her own. And so she took off at the end of that book for Maui, believing that working there on Doc Kai's spinoff demonology task force would help her figure herself out.
A year plus into Maui and well, Bea hasn't quite done that and now has a whole new set of anxieties: She's made a whole bunch of new friends, but she still feels separated from Sam....who himself feels stuck at home taking care of his parents (who may or may not need him)...as well as the rest of her family. Her powers, after teaming up with Scott at the end of Hollywood Heroine to do a combo-spell, are reacting in strange ways, seemingly allowing her to mind control even stronger before with less control than before...scaring Bea and making her try to lock those powers down to avoid once again being supervillainousy. And now that she feels like her family and friends have accepted her independence...she's afraid to admit her power-issues or anxieties to them, especially as they seem to be so proud of how successful she is on the surface. So Bea bottles up these feelings, and limits her communications with her family and loved ones, basically only sending Sam messages about her favorite Christmas movies (which are all made up but are absolutely hilarious in Kuhn's hands).
A year plus into Maui and well, Bea hasn't quite done that and now has a whole new set of anxieties: She's made a whole bunch of new friends, but she still feels separated from Sam....who himself feels stuck at home taking care of his parents (who may or may not need him)...as well as the rest of her family. Her powers, after teaming up with Scott at the end of Hollywood Heroine to do a combo-spell, are reacting in strange ways, seemingly allowing her to mind control even stronger before with less control than before...scaring Bea and making her try to lock those powers down to avoid once again being supervillainousy. And now that she feels like her family and friends have accepted her independence...she's afraid to admit her power-issues or anxieties to them, especially as they seem to be so proud of how successful she is on the surface. So Bea bottles up these feelings, and limits her communications with her family and loved ones, basically only sending Sam messages about her favorite Christmas movies (which are all made up but are absolutely hilarious in Kuhn's hands).
In another writer's hands, this plot setup could be frustrating - here's another protagonist heroine who is bottling inside her feelings (like the prior two books' protagonists) when she should be willing to trust in the love of her loed ones, who is going to get herself into trouble by not seeking others' advice until finally trusting in those people helps her avert mere disaster. But while there are some elements of that here, there's a lot else, and Kuhn spices it up with some fun characters, zany new powers, and amazing situations. We have Kaiju, Christmas movies, fun new characters with their own quirks, scientific reasoning, and oh yeah, some real real hot sexy moments. And Kuhn even acknowledges the repetitiveness in ways that both make sense and subvert your expectations, with a moment between Evie, Aveda, and Bea at the end that is so perfect it just ties the last three books in this series altogether. And so she manages to tell a great story that directly attacks the notion that women of color have to be resilient and sacrificing for the good of others....in a hell of a fun way.
I mean, I shouldn't lose track of the fact that this is a book about a girl with superpowers trying to save her loved ones from Kaiju, traveling possibly through time repeatedly to save the existence of said loved ones, all with some zany zany Christmas spirit along the way throughout both San Fran and Maui. That's there too. And it's why Kuhn's book can be both so fun and so poignant, with great characters and themes, and just makes me so happy to have enjoyed the ride six books and a novella deep.
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