This was, by far, the most emotionally intense book of the series so far. I'm pleased with how the arc progressed and "finished" and now, so help me.. with that epilogue.. I don't know how to survive until the next book. Courtney Maguire has a reader for life in me. I'm 100% addicted.

When the man Hiro loves dies, he is taken back home by his creator/master/lover, Hide, whether he’s ready to go back home or not. But Hiro’s grief is overwhelming, and despite ten years apart, nothing has changed with Hide. Oh, and Hiro and Hide happen to be youkai—Japanese monsters that are exceptionally Western vampire-like in this story.

Okay. Wow. So, first, I missed that this was book three of the series, not book 1, so that changes things a little for me. First, as someone who hasn’t read the previous books, I’m sure there were things I missed, but I didn’t feel like I was missing things. This book—other than the epilogue—felt very self-contained. This could have been a standalone novel and I’d have been quite satisfied with that. I am interested to what the previous books were about now!

Anyway, I wasn’t quite sure about this book at first—the first chapter in particular felt a little overwrought—but it settled into an interesting story within a few chapters. The story weaves together grief of loss, vampires (ahem, youkai), and a frayed love relationship with a couple people who desperately need to learn how to communicate with each other. The story is told, bouncing back and forth from the ‘now’ of 2004 to the past of 1993, and then even further past, building our understanding of what is happening and why it is happening.

There are two complaints I have over the book. First, though they’re called youkai, they’re vampires. There didn’t really seem to be anything particularly Japanese about their monster race. Secondly, there were several Japanese phrases peppered in throughout the text. While some of it seemed appropriate to me, particular cultural terms or set phrases that while could be translated don’t actually have a direct translation into English. But several times things were given in Japanese when they really didn’t need to be. Sayounara has a perfectly good English translation of “Goodbye.”

But even with these couple complaints, I found the story engaging and the characters while flawed—and frustrating!—interesting and sympathetic. I wanted to smack them upsides their heads while also wrapping them up in blankets and telling them it would be okay. And also, friggin talk to each other properly! ( )