Seven Deadly Shadows

This is actually not the first Courtney Alameda piece I've read. I read a short story based off her Shutter novel and then I read Shutter itself. I think she was in another anthology, too. I didn't review Shutter here, because I meant to reread it and take it apart, trying to find out what exactly I didn't like about it. I may still do that. I don't remember hating it, but it didn't work for me either. 

Seven Deadly Shadows is better than that. It's set it modern day Japan and the main character is a miko. She's 17, I think. Somewhere thereabouts. Her name is...Kira. Her name confuses me because her parents are traditional, yet I don't think of Kira as a traditional Japanese name. The authors could have chosen something better. It's my guess that they named her Kira after Akira Kurosawa, because a lot of the characters are named after the Seven Samurai, but it did take me out of the story a little bit and as the main character, her name is mentioned a lot.

The book starts off with Kira being bullied by the popular girls at her school. She's a scholarship kid basically and the school is mostly filled with spoiled rich kids. Then a few hours later, a bunch of yokai (assorted supernatural beings) attack the ancestral shrine where Kira works with her grandfather and other priests, including two guardian kitsune. Kira and her younger sister Ami are hiding under the floorboards where their grandfather hid them and get a sad, front row seat to his murder by an oni. Kira and Ami manage to flee after the yokai leave and the police are on their way. 

Later that night, Shiro, the younger of the two kitsune brothers who guard the shrine, comes to Kira's home and they make a plan to go to Tokyo (they're in Kyoto) to talk to Shiro's mom and Goro, the former kitsune guardian of the shrine. 

I'll pause a minute to discuss the characters. Kira and her grandfather can see yokai, which most humans can't, so there are some great descriptions of random ones throughout the book. The kitsune are both really hot guys with fox ears and claws that humans can't see. Ronin, the elder, has two tails. Shiro has none. Ronin is actually the one who betrayed the shrine and Kira blames him for her grandfather's death, as much as she blames the oni who actually killed him. Then there's also Shuten-dōji, the demon leader who is behind the entire plot. 

Kira's family sucks, both in character and in how they were written. Kira's mother and father are both business types who think the whole demon thing is overactive imagination. Her older brother is a completely useless dick who doesn't even seem to care about his grandfather's welfare. He makes one brief and painful appearance near the beginning and is never seen again. He was handled very poorly because he at least could have showed up somewhere near the end after everything was sorted out. Kira's younger sister Ami is cool for a child, but she also never gets an appearance after the initial attack scenes. I didn't feel that was realistic. She could have talked to Kira in school once or twice. Something. But no. The father is strict and honestly barely a presence. The mother ends up revealing that she, too, can see yokai but after a prediction when Kira was born, tried to shelter her daughter from the shrine life, thinking she could avoid the prophecy. Do not try to avoid prophecies. It never works. All of the family could have used some extra screentime in the aftermath of the final battle just to normalize themselves a bit and become better characters. But, again, no. So yeah, poor writing when it came to Kira's family. 

Excellent writing when it came to Kira and Shiro though. They're adorable. Their typical supernatural YA relationship really isn't rushed and they felt believable. I was on their side. Distracting name or no, Kira is a likeable lead, even though she does have some minor Mary Sue hints. She's doing magic way too quickly and also learns her sword-fighting a bit too quickly, too. She is shown as progressing at both things over time, but I don't think she should have been as good as she was after only like a month of practicing both things for the first time ever. 

Anyway, Kira and Shiro meet with O-Bei, Shiro's adoptive mom, who is a shinigami, a death god. They go around collecting souls, which appear in the form of butterflies or moths in different ways specific to each shinigami. Some of them appear to lead humans toward death, where others are more like merciful grim reapers. O-Bei agrees to help Kira, sending her main kitsune helper and a bunch of other kitsune to go rebuild the shrine, if Kira and Shiro can find a total of seven shinigami to stand as a cabal against Shuten-dōji. O-Bei wants to take over his role, though that's not revealed right away. She's clearly not a trustworthy character though and it's her fault that Ronin gave up being a kitsune and turned into a shinigami. 

Aside on Ronin: he is completely underdeveloped. He barely does anything, though a lot of that is because whenever he tries to talk to Kira and apologize or explain himself, she blows him off. So Ronin, the catalyst of all the death at the beginning, becomes barely a character and never gets any sort of resolution. Bad writing. 

Kira and Shiro start in Tokyo and then return to Kyoto, pretty much failing at all their tasks. They have very little luck finding shinigami because no one wants to cross Shuten-dōji or work with O-Bei. They also have no leads on the shard of the sacred sword hidden in the family shrine. That's what Shuten-dōji is after. He has all the other pieces. 

Slowly, shinigami come to help. They're all named after Seven Samurai characters. There's Shimada, the leader, who's very skilled at being a shinigami. His friend is Roji, who is shown as a young woman with short hair, gauged ears and tattoos, but her actual original appearance is more traditional. It's never explained but theorized that both had something to do with the sword long ago and were cursed to be shinigami. Roji is easily my favorite. I love her sass. The third is a cook named Heihachi. He only has one small white butterfly with him, clearly a child spirit, and he refuses to kill because of whatever happened with her. The fourth is Yuza, who was actually Shuten-dōji's best assassin, sent to kill Kira, but she was bested by the others and ends up flipping sides. O-Bei and Ronin are five and six. The seventh ends up being an oni who steals the pieces of the sword for them. 

The process of gathering all the shinigami and trying to get the sword (Kira and Yuza go to the death realm to look for it, not knowing Kiku the oni stole it already), while Kira is also still in school and trying to balance that and dealing with her bullies takes up like 95% of the book. It's a LOT of build-up to end in one rather short final battle. 

I think the authors did a decent job at it. I did like that Kira had to maintain her school life instead of the typical get out of real life while you're on your quest stuff that tends to happen to these YA heroes. I liked all the characters, except for the ones you're not supposed to like. The biggest failing is definitely the lack of character development for the family cast and for Ronin. 

It was an enjoyable departure from the usual YA religion/folklore stuff, which tends to focus heavily on Western. It's worth a read if you want something different, fun and fairly quick to get through.