Only a Monster by Vanessa Len

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It should have been the perfect summer. Sent to stay with her late mother’s eccentric family in London, sixteen-year-old Joan is determined to enjoy herself. She loves her nerdy job at the historic Holland House, and when her super cute co-worker Nick asks her on a date, it feels like everything is falling into place.

But she soon learns the truth. Her family aren’t just eccentric: they’re monsters, with terrifying, hidden powers. And Nick isn’t just a cute boy: he’s a legendary monster slayer, who will do anything to bring them down.

As she battles Nick, Joan is forced to work with the beautiful and ruthless Aaron Oliver, heir to a monster family that hates her own. She’ll have to embrace her own monstrousness if she is to save herself, and her family. Because in this story...

...she is not the hero.

Trigger & Content Warnings: death of family members, death, threats of violence, violence, blood, murder, massacres, brainwashing, interrogation, involuntary drug use, racism (microaggressions), fantasy xenophobia

I have no clue how I feel about Only a Monster. There were so many times I felt like dropping the book at the end of a chapter, but then somehow I made it to 80%? I was in too deep to stop at that point.

It’s not like I haven’t dropped a book past the 50% mark, because I’ve done it at 60-70% before too. It’s just rare. And I figure if I have like maybe 50 pages left, I might as well finish it, you know? Sometimes things pick up at the end and other times, I’m left with disappointment. And once in a while, things fall in the middle, like this one.

Only a Monster is Vanessa Len’s debut and the first book in the Only a Monster trilogy. It features time travel, and thankfully, we’re not bouncing around here and there and everywhere, where things potentially get complicated and confusing. Len does a pretty good job of explaining how the time travel and the world worked — I liked how we were finding things out as Joan was finding things out. The pacing of the novel was well-done as well, and I loved how morally grey everything is here. I genuinely sat two days after just thinking about the book and trying to process my thoughts.

However, I feel like it was also a little vague, sometimes repetitive, and had some loopholes in the logic that my brain can’t really wrap itself around. I wish there was a little more information about the world and fleshing things out (which is ironic because I also hate info dumping). There’s a lot of “The Hunts and Olivers hate each other” but there’s not really an explanation why Joan’s family and Aaron’s family hate each other so much and have been for centuries.

In defense of “finding things out as Joan finds things out,” though, Joan doesn’t know why either, but she never asks about it either. Granted, she’s a 16-year-old who got chucked into this world after a traumatizing event, so she’s probably not going to be concerned about that just yet (I wouldn’t). But you’d think with the amount of times she’s told this or witnesses Aaron and her cousin Ruth wanting to strangle each other when within proximity of each other that she’d at least question it at some point.

And then we have Joan visiting her mother’s family each summer and the prologue where her Gran shows her “the monster way” — you’d think she’d know more about the monster world. This gets explained later on, but early in the book Gran goes, “I wish I could have prepared you more,” but according to Ruth later, Gran didn’t allow the family to tell Joan anything. All of that just seemed contradictory, and there were additional moments where I felt was the case.

Only a Monster also just feels like it was a sequel of sorts rather than the first in a series, or at least missing a novella. It’s very much pitched as a sweeping romance, but the main love interest Nick appears like maybe 10% of the book — it felt underwhelming and even lacking. Maybe I’ll feel less that way with the rest of the series, but I wish we had more backstory to Nick’s and Joan’s relationship instead of jumping right in.

Strangely enough, Only a Monster was an addictive and fast-paced debut novel. I’m a little hesitant about picking up Never a Hero, but I’m still curious on how Len develops the rest of the trilogy.

Sophia

Blogger at Bookwyrming Thoughts · Website · Read More Posts

Sophia started blogging in February 2012 for the hell of it and is surprisingly still around. She has a GIF for nearly everything, probably listens to too much K-Pop and is generally in an existential crisis of sorts (she's trying her best). More of her bookish reviews and K-Pop Roundups can be found at The Arts STL.

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