After three novels and a novella, you’d think I’d run out of new things to say about the Heroine Complex series, but the fourth book, Haunted Heroine, found new ways to surprise and delight me. This series involves a group of women, some with superpowers, who fight paranormal manifestations in San Francisco and who form a family. There’s Evie Tanaka, her sister Bea, Evie’s best friend Annie Chang AKA Aveda Jupiter, and trainer and bodyguard Lucy Valdez. While each book includes romance, the focus is very much on how the women relate to each other and on each woman’s personal growth. Also, there are demonic cupcakes and other shenanigans that definitely spark joy if you are into that sort of thing, which I SO VERY MUCH am.
In Haunted Heroine, Evie is pregnant and panicked. When Bea was a young teen and Evie was still in college, their mother died and Evie had to mother her grieving sister. It was an awful time for both sisters, and Evie is terrified of messing up with a baby after the struggles she had with Bea, even though Bea is currently thriving. Not so coincidentally, Evie and Aveda go back to Evie’s college to investigate a series of hauntings undercover as graduate students. This leads Evie to confront her past and deal with her current worries. It’s funny, it’s exciting, and it’s very emotionally intense.
You could start the series with this book and get enough back story to follow it, but why would you? A great joy of this series has been watching the character development progress from the first book, not to mention all the wacky manifestations of evil along the way. Several of the characters started therapy since the first book, which they refer to as a positive thing, and their increasing maturity is delightful. Returning to Evie’s college, where Evie passed the most traumatic years of her life, lets the reader revisit the characters as we first knew them while simultaneously enjoying them in the now. It’s a book about healing, and you should expect to cry.
In addition to being a tearjerker, the book is funny, as Aveda and Evie decide to experience all the parts of college that they missed out on earlier in their life (minus, in Evie’s case, the drinking). This includes parties that get weird thanks to magic punch, late night trips to Taco Bell, wearing cheesy Halloween costumes, and coming up with a signal for their dorm room that one of them is inside and, um, occupied.
There’s romance in the book, but it’s one of the book’s weakest parts. Evie’s husband, Nate, is absent for most of the book for reasons that frankly made me want to smack him upside the head (metaphorically) and which seemed out of character. When he finally turns up again it’s too little, too late for me. He doesn’t get much attention to his own character development, an issue which has been a problem with the romances throughout the series. I love the fact that women take center stage, but if romance is going to play such a large role in their lives, then I feel like the male characters need to be at least a little more fleshed out, no pun intended. Nate has his own baggage for sure, and he’s had more page time in previous books, but in this book he’s even more of a side character than usual.
Like the other books in the series, Haunted Heroine is not always the best paced or most plausible or finely polished piece of literature on earth. However, the characters are intensely relatable and fun to read about. By this point in the series I am, clearly, deeply invested in their happiness. The sense of inclusion and intersectional feminism is joyful and the supernatural shenanigans are weird and entertaining, and, toward the end of the book, actually scary. There’s a twist I didn’t see coming which makes all kinds of sense, and I do love a well-constructed twist. The whole atmosphere is one of spooky sisterhood. Because of pacing problems and the way Nate’s character behaves, I can’t say this book is perfect, but I will say that reading any of the books from this series is an almost ridiculously enjoyable experience.
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I enjoyed Heroine Complex but haven’t returned to the series. When I run out of Alexis Hall, maybe I’ll do that; you reminded me what fun the women are.