Bingo Square – N – and 3 bingos, making for 5 total (1. middle row – BINGO, 2. middle column, and 3. diagonal bottom left to top right)
I got this one sometime last year as a Prime First choice (I usually don’t bother because I have enough books I want to read that I haven’t gotten to without adding random free stuff but every once in a while they’ll have an option that sounds like something I would have picked up on my own), and since I was struggling with any N- titles, figured it was time to read this.
This novel had a lot of potential and there are quite a lot of good things about it – the world building and the use of Korean mythology and folklore. It was nice to have a very different take on fantasy.
I am not entirely sure if the author’s intent is for this to be a fantasy trilogy (or quadrology since it’s the Realm of Four Kingdoms) but I think this would have been a great premise for a long running urban fantasy series, like The Dresden Files or Mercy Briggs. A nine tailed fox who uses her special abilities as a PI? Like she literally mentions her tracking abilities. And was working for a PI at one point. But I think this got too deep into the magic and revealing secrets on the first book for this to be intended as a long term urban fantasy series (just think how many books in it took for Toby Daye to discover secrets about her abilities, or for Harry Dresden and Kate Daniels to reveal everything they knew about their backgrounds with the reader).
The main issue with this novel is the main character. She’s just very inconsistent – one moment she’s this tough as nails supernatural being who has been living on her own and in hiding for the last 114 years, the next she is acting like the teenage kid she looks like. (She had a big traumatic life event when she was 18 and stopped aging, and the novel can’t seem to quite decide if Sunny is streetwise and weary or if she stopped emotionally maturing when she stopped aging.)
It also leads to some weird stuff with the love interest … and I probably shouldn’t say anything about age gaps as someone who is very much Team Angel when it comes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer but in this case, Sunny met the love interest when he was 13 and kind of helped raise him for 3 years, and now he is 24 but she still looks 18. I know I usually overlook the age gaps in fantasy but it’s the fact that she knew him when he was 13 that makes this one a bit harder to deal with. On the other hand, she looks 18 while he is 24 so now it’s also weird for other reasons. I wish she had stopped aging at like 21 or something. And also, she’s a virgin. I think that’s supposed to make it less creepy because she is so inexperienced with dating etc but it made the whole insta-lust thing even more irritating.
Also, I noticed later in the book that the narrator kept using “male” and “female” and it just seemed like an odd choice … like, “that female was the most beautiful I had ever seen.” I wondered if maybe it was a nod to the character being an animal shape shifter but then another character also did it. Maybe it’s a language/translation thing since this is based on Korean folklore and tradition but it was a distracting choice.
Anyway, I liked the overall plot. The pacing was weird because the book has quite a few times where the characters go from frantically scrambling to save each other or the world and destroy the threat to just hiding out somewhere with no sense of urgency whatsoever for a week. I also think the world and additional characters introduced were interesting though once again Sunny’s interactions with them could have been more developed because she doesn’t feel like an adult interacting with them and acts more like a teen – and they all think she is so amazing and beautiful which was a bit much.
So not entirely sure whether I’ll continue on – there was enough promise to keep going (we all know how bad the first Dresden novel was) but I fear the author could also easily lean into the things that didn’t work as well so really just depends on how much the books in my TBR are appealing to me.