Shadow of the Fox
By Julie Kagawa
Rating: 
Goodreads | Amazon | Harlequin TEEN
Synopsis:
One thousand years ago, the great Kami Dragon was summoned to grant a single terrible wish—and the land of Iwagoto was plunged into an age of darkness and chaos.
Now, for whoever holds the Scroll of a Thousand Prayers, a new wish will be granted. A new age is about to dawn.
Raised by monks in the isolated Silent Winds temple, Yumeko has trained all her life to hide her yokai nature. Half kitsune, half human, her skill with illusion is matched only by her penchant for mischief. Until the day her home is burned to the ground, her adoptive family is brutally slain and she is forced to flee for her life with the temple’s greatest treasure—one part of the ancient scroll.
There are many who would claim the dragon’s wish for their own. Kage Tatsumi, a mysterious samurai of the Shadow Clan, is one such hunter, under orders to retrieve the scroll…at any cost. Fate brings Kage and Yumeko together. With a promise to lead him to the scroll, an uneasy alliance is formed, offering Yumeko her best hope for survival. But he seeks what she has hidden away, and her deception could ultimately tear them both apart.
With an army of demons at her heels and the unlikeliest of allies at her side, Yumeko’s secrets are more than a matter of life or death. They are the key to the fate of the world itself.
My Review:
I was lucky enough to win this ARC from Goodreads during a giveaway and I was super excited to read it. After finishing the book, I am perched on the edge of my seat for the next installment!
But any who, this story combines Japanese folklore, action and adventure into a series of events that keeps you from being able to put the book down. Our main characters include Yumeko, a half-fox half teenage girl, paired with her ultimate enemy but also savior and protector, Tatsumi. Yumeko is raised in a monastery where the monks have been teaching her to control her little wolf powers and become more focused on her human nature. But when events start to unfold that unleash an ancient evil into the land, Yumeko finds herself alone and protecting a piece of ancient scroll that could be the undoing of everyone.
Tatsumi, the demon slayer, is on a mission to find this scroll. But when he meets Yumeko and they set out on their journey to “find” the scroll, their relationship becomes dangerous. Tatsumi does not know that Yumeko has this scroll, or that she is a half-fox. Believing that she can lead him to the scroll, he begins to travel with her and protect her from dangers. But not without peril of his own. For if he should give into human emotions and weaken his control on the demon living within him, he could kill everyone around him.
Follow Yumeko and Tatsumi on a grand adventure of perils and personal growth as they both attempt to carry out their own missions and face an evil that hasn’t been known for a thousand years!
About the Author:
Julie Kagawa, the New York Times bestselling author of the Iron Fey and Blood of Eden series was born in Sacramento, California. But nothing exciting really happened to her there. So, at the age of nine she and her family moved to Hawaii, which she soon discovered was inhabited by large carnivorous insects, colonies of house geckos, and frequent hurricanes. She spent much of her time in the ocean, when she wasn’t getting chased out of it by reef sharks, jellyfish, and the odd eel.
When not swimming for her life, Julie immersed herself in books, often to the chagrin of her schoolteachers, who would find she hid novels behind her Math textbooks during class. Her love of reading led her to pen some very dark and gruesome stories, complete with colored illustrations, to shock her hapless teachers. The gory tales faded with time (okay, at least the illustrations did), but the passion for writing remained, long after she graduated and was supposed to get a
real job.
To pay the rent, Julie worked in different bookstores over the years, but discovered the managers frowned upon her reading the books she was supposed to be shelving. So she turned to her other passion: training animals. She worked as a professional dog trainer for several years, dodging Chihuahua bites and overly enthusiastic Labradors, until her first book sold and she stopped training to write full time.
Julie now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where the frequency of shark attacks are at an all time low. She lives with her husband, an obnoxious cat, an Australian Shepherd who is too smart for his own good, and a hyper-active Papillion.
Adventures in Literature 