#vanessa len
Review:Only A Monster (Vanessa Len)
Rating: ★★★★★/5
“She pushed down the wrongness until all she could feel of it was a lingering horror. If only a monster would do this, then she could do this. She was a monster, wasn’t she?”
I enjoyed this book SO much. I love a good twisty turny time travel book, and I got that here, plus some great characters and a really fun plot.
Joan knows her summer in London is going to be great. She’s working at Holland House, she loves her job, and she has a crush on a boy named Nick who she is about to go on a date with. Things are looking wonderful - until she finds out that monsters are real, that they steal time from humans, and that she is one. Set on a path that will lead her to multiple discoveries and revelations that she isn’t ready for, Joan will have to decide whether to accept her fate, or do anything she can to save the family she loves more than life itself.
I’m a sucker for time travel in books like Passenger or Claudia Gray’s Firebird trilogy. Those scenes where the characters are figuring out what’s the same, what’s different, how they’ve changed things, where they are, all of that is like crack to me. I love trying to figure it out with them and imagining how things could be different if we could go back and forth.
This book has such an imaginative way of dealing with time travel as a concept. “Monsters” who take time from others in order to travel for their own personal gain is so interesting, and the way it’s portrayed as no big deal for some and this huge moral conundrum for others is fascinating. I would love to steal time from random people to go back and forth in time, ngl, but Joan’s struggles with who and what she is are also relatable.
Joan is flawed as a character, and sometimes that grated on me, but overall, I did like her. She just wants her family back so badly and is willing to do anything to make that happen; there was one scene in particular where she just would NOT leave a very tense situation where I was like !!! GIRL COME ON. But otherwise, her choices made sense, and I was rooting for her.
Both Aaron and Nick are highlights of the book for me. There’s no love triangle (…yet?) but I could see the appeal of both of them for Joan. Predictably, I’m fully Team Aaron, but with the focus on Nick as the hero and how he came to be the way he is, I also loved the idea of fated romance and how that changes time.
Again, I just love time travel. I love how it’s done here. Were there parts of this that perhaps could’ve been edited to be tighter? Sure. But overall, I have very few critiques, and my enjoyment of the story overshadows everything else. This was such a fun time, and I can’t wait to be back in this world of monsters.
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