Only A Monster: Vanessa Len

“The first time I met you, it was like I already knew you. Like I’d known you my whole life. Wherever you were, I wanted to be there too. You were like the sun. I was always turning toward you.”

Brief Synopsis:

Most stories are about the hero saving the day, but has anyone stopped to think about looking at the story from the monster’s point of view? Meet Joan, who’s family on her mother’s side has hinted to her for quite some time now that maybe they’re not the good guys. She’s about to go on a really important date when she loses most of the day. She misses the date and about 8 or so hours of daylight. When she gets home, her grandma tells her that she and her family are monsters that can jump through time by taking days, months, years of life from human beings.

She’s disgusted at her family that they’ve kept this from her for so long, and that they can do something so horrible to people at all. The next day she flees to Nick, who she was supposed to go on the date with. Good, dependable Nick, who she’s been working with a museum of sorts for the time being, a historical old home. They talk the day away and she’s almost able to forget about some things, until a bunch of monsters randomly show up at the home and tell Nick and Joan that they can’t let them live now that they saw them pretty much appear out of thin air the way they did.

Joan fights, but she fights poorly, and just when she thinks it’s all over, Nick comes to life and attacks the crap out of them, killing four of the monsters in quick succession. It’s then that he tells her that he’s been raised his whole life to be a monster hunter, and he can’t allow any of them to live, including Joan’s own family. She had previously sent out an SOS to her family, so unfortunately, they show up to the historical home to help out and they’re all slaughtered. Oh, and that other monster family? Think of a Romeo and Juliet kind of situation, and Joan and the son from that side, Aaron are the only ones that seem to make it out of the house alive, at least in terms of monsters.

Though she’s loathe to admit it, Joan needs Aaron and his cocky ways for now. She can’t deny that the only way to save herself and the rest of her family is to take time from humans and travel back to reset what happened that day. Nick and his people haven’t given up, though, and they’re still after them, so Joan and Aaron have to act fast. They attend a heavily-populated event in town and take time before Joan makes her first real, purposeful jump with Aaron’s help. Now they’re back a while, like to before Joan was born, and she finds it so intoxicating. Whether she likes it or not, she just can’t deny that the time travel is in her blood and she’s enthralled with the idea.

Joan almost instantly begins doing everything that she can to reverse the timeline, warn her family, literally anything that might stop Nick and his people from the massacre that just took place. She argues with Aaron a lot, and things seem hopeless. She ends up drifting off to sleep and is woken by Aaron when someone is breaking into their room. Joan’s amazed when it’s her cousin Ruth – the same cousin that she watched stabbed the night before. Though it’s only been one night for Aaron and Joan, it’s been over two years since the incident for Ruth, and she said that she’s been looking for survivors ever since. Someone else has been looking for the survivors, too, and it seems that they’re being picked off.

Looking for some answers into the timeline and how to possibly change it, Aaron and Joan go and talk to another family of monsters. These ones deal in truths, and the guy tells Joan that there is a rumor that the “king” that rules the timeline has a weapon or a tool that could reverse it, but that it’s a heavily guarded secret. He also tells Joan that the necklace that her grandma gave her right before she died is pretty much the key to get into the Monster Court to get to this device or weapon. None of this information comes free, of course, and now Joan owns this family and has to pay up one way or another sometime down the road. Joan is surprised and hurt when both Ruth and Aaron pretty much refuse to go along with this crazy plan to get into the Monster Court, and she takes off.

She stops at a diner, and who’s there but Nick? Though it seems impossible, he tells her that he has his own way of traveling. She knows she can’t make a scene, so there’s really nothing she can do when Nick steals the necklace from her. The whole scene has some pretty crazy tension on it, and I know that Nick’s a dickhead (but is he? He’s the ‘hero’) but I just kind of really want him and Joan to angrily make out already. She gets back to Aaron and Ruth and tells them what happened, informing them that they have to stop Nick before he can get to the weapon and eradicate all of monster-kind. They make a deal with another monster, from a family that Aaron hates, to break into the Monster Court.

The night begins well enough and they make their way inside. Once they get close to the vault that supposedly holds this weapon, though, they’re stuck. Somehow, a space in time has been placed in front of the vault like a blackhole, and it looks like it takes back thousands and thousands of years. It’s a frozen tundra, there are saber-tooth tigers, and pretty much nobody that walks into that place is ever getting out alive. With Ruth’s help, Joan figures out a way to use the Hunt magic to create a tunnel that Tom, the other monster, goes through with Aaron and Joan. They’re stopped again at the actual vault door when Joan can’t pick the lock. She’s so close, and she’s frustrated, she feels a weird power surge through her, and suddenly the door is open, but she can’t explain it.

All she knows is that her gran told her that something like this was going to happen to her, and she couldn’t trust a single soul with the information.

When they get inside, it isn’t a vault at all. It’s a prison. Whoever was locked in there, and for however long, is a mystery as it’s now empty. There is sign of struggle, though, and Joan finds something to tuck away for later peruse. They know now that they have to make a break for it, because everyone else is definitely privy to a break-in. They get separated, and Joan literally runs headfirst into Nick. He has her pushed up against a wall at knifepoint and she’s wrapped around him, poised to steal life from him. They stay embraced like that, neither truly able to hurt the other, and y’all. It’s sending me. He tells her to please leave him be, because it’s only going to end one way, and they separate.

Through some more crafty Hunt maneuvering, they break out and all run in different directions. They had designated a checkpoint before, and Joan is the first to arrive. Tom is quick after, and he confronts her about the prison. He says that the weapon is a person, not a thing, and he knows that a message was left behind. He claims that this message is for him, and that Joan would be smart to give it up. She doesn’t, not right away, and she also doesn’t tell Aaron and Ruth about what happened. For now, for better or worse, they’re all stuck together and take off for a safe house that Aaron knows about.

The four of them make it to the safehouse after a really close encounter that Tom actually saved them from. At this point, for what it’s worth, Joan figures she has to trust Tom and gives him the device that she took from that prison room. He ends up telling everyone that the “weapon”, or archivist, is a member of the Liu family, remember me telling you about the ones that never forget? Not only that, but he’s the love of Tom’s life and he was captured when he ended up knowing too much about the true timeline and the king. When the group watches what Jamie (the Liu) left behind, they see a history of Nick being tortured by monsters again and again, with the timeline resetting, so that they could truly make him hate monsters. Essentially, he was made into the hero, not born.

The group goes and sees the younger Jamie that exists where they are, and he ends up telling them that one of the stories of the hero depicts him being a normal human boy in love with a half-monster. Hmm, sound familiar anyone? From there, Joan knows she has to go back to their own time and confront Nick once and for all with all of the information that she’s garnered. Her and Aaron have this moment right before she leaves, and he tells her that when the timeline resets he won’t remember any of this and she can’t go after him, because whatever secret there is about Joan is dangerous if Aaron finds out without remembering how much she means to him. I know. I usually am not super crazy about love triangles and root for one over the other, but can Joan have them both, please?

She goes back to their time and is instantly captured by Nick’s people. They make her drink a truth serum and she literally just word-vomits absolutely everything to Nick: his torture, her feelings for him, their complicated history. In a last-ditch effort to break out, she tries something that’s been on her mind. She uses her half-human side and literally takes time from her own life to jump, and ends up at a time into the future where the house is vacant and Nick is a little bit older. He has been waiting for her, and he tells her that he’s had time to panic, wondering how much of her own life she took away just to get away from him. He tells her that he's always loved her.

It breaks her, but Joan does one more thing with this new power of hers: she un-makes Nick. She’s figured out that her power is a way to take things back to their most-base self, and she does this to him, reversing their history, reversing his torture, reversing everything that made him into the hero and made him such a threat for her life. She’s back with her family, who were never killed with Nick, and nobody is any the wiser, not Ruth and certainly not Aaron. She feels so alone, being the only one that remembers this part of history that technically never happened. She’s also pretty sure that that special magic or hers is gone now.

My Rating:

I want to be extra here and say 12/10, because you guys, I fucking loved this book. I instantly Googled if it was a standalone and read from the author that it’s going to be a series and I am just. So. Jazzed. I recommend it all across the board.

Devastation Rating:

The way that it ended was seriously so sad, and I have no idea if I want her to choose Nick or Aaron. Someone help. I’ll say 7/10.

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Until next time <3