Only a Monster (Monsters, #1) by Vanessa Len
Published by HarperTeen on February 22, 2022
ISBN: 0063024640
Pages: 416
Genres: Adventure, Fantasy
Format: Fiction
Goodreads

While Joan is spending the summer with her beloved Gran and other relatives, her world is turned upside down when she realizes that not only is her family made of monsters that travel through time by stealing time from humans’ lives, her crush is a mythical hero whose entire purpose is to brutally eradicate her kind. After her first accidental time travel, Joan has very little time to learn the family secrets before her family is slaughtered. She bands up with a surviving monster from a rival family to try to travel through time, unlock the secret to changing an allegedly fixed timeline, and prevent the fight that takes her family from her. 

I like the premise of this book but the book itself had some issues. About halfway through I realized I had absolutely no idea who Joan is. The character is underdeveloped and, as a result, it’s had to get too invested in what happens to anybody. The minor characters are also undeveloped and all seem to be there just to advance the plot (although, a few of them start to get a little more well-rounded in the last quarter of the book). The other, bigger, issue for me was that, given that this will be a trilogy, it’s clearly heading in a love triangle direction between Joan and two other main characters. Neither one of them are decent options, and the romance between her and the hero/crush borders on violent. Joan can do better and it would have been so much more interesting to have her focus on her newly discovered power rather than her love life.

Reviewed by Sarah Maciejewski, Patten Free Library, Bath