 Hi everyone, my name is Steph. This is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to be talking about the Only a Monster series by Vanessa Lin. Now I received a copy of Never a Hero from Alan and I'm one for reviews, so thank you very much to them. But before I could read this, I had to read the first book in the series, which was Only a Monster, which I actually purchased when it first came out and I just didn't get a chance to read it. This is a young adult paranormal slash fantasy trilogy. We have books one and two out already. And this is a really interesting world because it is set on earth and we do have humans, but we also have another group of people who are called monsters. And the way that this world is set up, the monsters are monsters because they are able to steal life force from humans, reducing a human's lifespan by hours or days or years by whatever they take from them, and then storing that energy to be able to jump through time either forwards and backwards. And as the books go on, we learn that there are 12 families of monsters, there are some allies within those families, there are also some enemies within those families, and those families also have additional abilities on top of being able to travel through time. Our protagonist in Only a Monster and Never a Hero is Joan, and she comes from a family of monsters. She's half human, half monster, and she doesn't really know anything about the family's history and their abilities. As a child, she demonstrated some of the family ability but seemed to lose it over time. And so the rest of her family kind of kept it quiet. She's a monster from her mother's side and her mother passed away or disappeared when she was quite young. So she mostly lives with her father, but she tends to spend the summer with her maternal grandmother and her cousins from that side of the family. And the story opens one summer while she is staying with them. She is volunteering up at a local old mansion, which has been restored and is basically a museum. And she works there with this guy called Nick, and they are going on a date for the first time, and she really likes Nick. And as she's getting ready to go on this date, she tries to help out a neighbour of hers, and she accidentally takes time from him and travels through time for the first time, which freaks her out. She has no idea what's going on. And when she gets home, her grandmother sits her down and begins to explain it to her, and Joan is horrified because she sees the abilities as being morally wrong, because she's taken life from someone without their consent, without their knowledge. And so she's really fighting against this new knowledge of herself. And obviously, she missed her date because she travelled through time, and so she has to then go and explain to Nick, you know, she does like him, and she didn't blow him off. There was literally nothing that she could do. And as she's explaining this to Nick, another monster family arrives, and they happen to be rivals to Joan's family. But then there is a reveal to do with Nick, and that is that Nick is the fabled hero, and the hero is, has been purposely designed and constructed to kill monsters. And Nick and a team of individuals are in town in London to make sure that the monsters are killed, and that they can no longer disrupt timelines and take human lives. And so there is a massacre, and Joan ends up on the run with the son of her family's rival family, Aaron. And she ends up travelling significantly through time this time, which freaks her out again. And so this series has a really cool concept in that you have a protagonist who doesn't really know how she feels about everything that's going on around her. She knows that it's wrong, but she also now is trying to avenge her family, and trying to write a timeline. Like she doesn't understand the rules of the world that she lives in anymore, and she is trying to do things that people around her are telling her are not possible. You can't go back, and you can't stop someone from being killed, or you can't go back in time and change the timeline. You can't end up in your own timeline because that has serious implications for you as an individual. And I'm not a big fantasy reader anymore, and I'm not a reader who likes a lot of really heavy world building and info dumping on magic systems, and the world and how it works in one go. And I think what Vanessa Len does really well, particularly in this first book, is she drip feeds the information we need as we need it, because Joan is learning it as she needs it. She's building up the characters in the story. Joan, Nick and Aaron are our three main characters, but we also have Joan's cousin and a few other key players who become quite important as we move into Never a Hero. And we learn quite a few things about Joan in this first book, and she learns some things about herself, but there are still some very big unanswered questions about her family and her personal history, because she's able to do things that members of her family are not. And the end of Only a Monster sets up Never a Hero. And I really can't say what it is without spoiling it, which means I really can't talk about the basic premise of Never a Hero without spoiling the book. However, if you do read the blurb of the book, you will figure out pretty quickly what happened at the end of Only a Monster. But suffice to say that Joan finds herself back in her time, and her relationships with Nick and Aaron are completely different. There are very few people who remember what happened in Only a Monster. And so she is living in a world now where again, the rules have changed on her, and she's having to live with the consequences of what she has chosen to do. But of course, the whole way through the first book, and even through the second book, there is this conversation that the timeline does what it wants, and it will try and course correct anything that you do to it. And so Never a Hero is really about this course correction. And we have an antagonist who we had seen briefly through the first book, but we specifically meet this character in the second book, who is trying to orchestrate a really significant change and a really different way that the world works, and to restore monsters to being sort of the top of society where humans know about them and fear them. Joan has to reconnect with Nick and with Aaron, both of whom who don't understand their connection, who don't know their history, and who are impacted by what has happened since the end of the first book. The writing in the series is really wonderful. As I said, I like the way that Vanessa Lenn is able to weave in the information we need as we need it, rather than just here is a huge chunk of information that you need to retain before you continue on. She is very good at pacing the story. I think she has built all of the characters up really well. She's playing with archetypes. Nick as the hero is the typical definition of an archetypical hero in a story. He is genuinely good, and it's really hard to make a character who is genuinely trying to do good and do the right thing all the time an interesting character. I think she does achieve that with him. But that said, he's not always the most interesting person on page. And I think there are a lot of really complicated things that go on in Joan, and particularly in Aaron's history. And we, we don't spend as much time with Aaron in this book as we did in the first one. And at times that might have been slightly detrimental to this story, but it also wouldn't have fit properly in this story either. And I think once we get the third book, we'll see that we'll see Aaron's story woven back into that narrative at a slightly higher level than we got in Never a Hero. All of these characters have a lot of depth, and they have had a lot of things happen to them. There is a lot of trauma in their backgrounds. This is an action-paced story. As I said, there is a, you know, there is a massacre of monsters at the start of the book. We don't see that physically on page. We sort of see the after effects of that and some of the key characters who have been killed initially. But that does have a flow on effect. We also find out that characters have been tortured and have had to experience really traumatic, repeated events over and over again in order to shape them into who they are. We know that Aaron comes from a family where he was mistreated and he was seen as an outcast within his own family. And so there is that emotional trauma that is brought on from that as well. There is a lot of depth. There is a lot of things happening in the story. This does end up on a cliffhanger. So you will need to read the final book whenever that comes out in order to get the conclusion to the story. But as a reader who does not read YA all the time anymore, I loved this. Like I was so glad that I got to read them back to back and that I hadn't read Only a Monster before I picked this one up. It meant I got to read through that story in a fairly contained way. And it was just great. I really, really enjoyed it. I highly recommend it. I've said it many times. I think Australian young adult fiction is just some of the best out there. And I think the quality of the writing is amazing. So if you are looking for a paranormal slash fantasy read, I would recommend this series. I will leave a link to where you can find out more information about the book and the author down below. If you have read Only a Monster or Never a Hero, feel free to chat to me about it in the comments. I had a great time reading them. And I, as I said, I do highly recommend them if you enjoy reading young adult titles. If you just want to let me know that you're here, but you don't want to leave a comment, feel free to leave a rose emoji down below. Otherwise, I hope that we're in the world just staying safe and healthy. And I will see you in my next video. Bye everyone.