Yukiko is a Kitsune, belonging to the Fox clan. Her blood is filled with lightning and power - the descendant of the beings that shaped their world. Yet in a land choking with poisonous lotus and blood red skies, she is impure. The girl is a dense shadowy ball of tension and hate and secrets. She is wrong, broken - a wild thing that musts be crushed. She held in all her power, her strength and passion, and it ate away at her insides. Eroded her bones and poisoned her bloodstream. When she flings herself off a burning ship and crashes into the haunted mountains, she is reborn. The brittle shell that meagerly protected her against the world shattered. …show more content…
Yet Kristoff creating a relationship that was so complex and unique and beautiful. We drew off of ancient Japanese tales of spirits and humans - of beasts and their riders. Yukiko and the arashitora (Buruu) for a bond of power and spirit. They fuse into one entity. When a hoard of demons attack them, “There was no Yukiko. There was no Buruu” (185). In their crisis, they lose their individual identity - the strength of one becomes the strength of the other. Thus, “They plummeted from the gloom, screaming with one voice, cripples lightning flashing at the edges of their feathers” (184). They are just flesh of the same soul. That relationship was so remarkable, so exciting and different. A beauty met a beast and instead of falling in love, instead of him turning out to be a prince, instead of fairies and magic, there is something much more breathtaking - the rebirth of a broken girl and a lonesome creature into a thunderous storm of …show more content…
Yukiko is sent to the capital to murder the shogun. She is embraced by the underground rebellion. She learns how to stand on dressers and shove aside ceiling panels to escape the guards, which trees are tall and sturdy enough to climb and slip over the gate of the palace, which tea houses will hide her, which women have knives hidden in their kimono. For a rebellion, it was written fell but it helt traditional. I expected an ending where they surge up and defeat the shogun, declare victory and peace will fall. Instead, Yukiko is alone. Buruu is in chains, the rebellion does not join her, the women who hid her are nowhere to be seen. She faced the Shogun with his gun pointed to her forehead and a crowd gazing at her trembling body. Yukiko, a small girl in the palace who slipped through its crack and hid in its shadows, rose and “felt the shape of him, the heat of him, stretching toward him and closing her fist about his mind” (305). In the end, this is a story about a girl who was broken and hollow who became a fiery kitsune who could destroy the man who controlled the world with one thought, alone. It was her journey, a odyssey of pain and blood and demons, but also of love and feathers and the feeling of the air whipping on your face as she flew on the back of her