Do not mess with death—That’s pretty much the golden rule of magic. You can have all the magic power in the world, but if you use it to bring someone back from the dead, things will not go as planned. I know that, you know that, even Harry Potter knows that. But apparently Lula Mortiz does not. Bruja Born is the second book in Zoraida Córdova’s Brooklyn Brujas series. Two years ago, I reviewed Labyrinth Lost, which Alex Mortiz accidentally sends her family to the underworld while trying to banish her magic. Now, in the sequel published last month, Alex’s sister Lula gets her own story.
As the oldest Mortiz sister, Lula has always been the one who had it together. She came easily into her powers as a healer—the same ability that their mother has. She’s beautiful and popular at school. She’s captain of the step team, and she’s been going steady with her soccer-player boyfriend Maks for what feels like forever. But ever since being dragged through the underworld, finding out that her sister Alex is an all-powerful Encantrix, and having their dad suddenly re-join the family, Lula has been having trouble fitting back into her old life. Then her chance for normalcy is shattered forever. On the way to their final game of the season the school buses get into a fatal accident, and Maks doesn’t seem likely to pull through. Though others warn her not to interfere, Lula will do whatever it takes to save the boy she loves. But cheating Lady de la Muerte comes with some unintended consequences.
I’ve ranted before about why I’m not a fan of the zombie romance genre: zombies just don’t share the allure and sex appeal of their cousins, the vampire. Past attempts at making zombie boys the new undead hotties really didn’t do it for me. But Bruja Born cleverly plays with this trope. Lula really wants her tale to be a love story, and throughout the book, she struggles to come to terms with the fact that it may not be. Rather than a cheesy tale of a teenage girl who falls deeper in love with a zombie as he acts more and more human (see: Generation Dead), Lula’s story works in the opposite direction: She starts off deeply in love with Maks, but those feelings begin to change as she watches him slowly lose his humanity. Like the zombie’s victims, I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest as I watched Lula struggle so hard to hold onto her love.
The other thing I loved about this book, is that we get a deeper look at the other magical beings that inhabit Brooklyn in Zoraida Córdova’s world. In the first book, we were introduced to the network of Bruja families in south Brooklyn and the all-too-real deities that they worship. In Bruja Born, we learn that there are also vampires and fae, as well as hunters who work to protect the humans from all these magical folk. These different groups maintain a delicate peace through the Thornhill Alliance. McKay and Frederik, a fae and vampire duo who prove to be instrumental allies to the Mortiz girls, are my two new favorite characters.
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