What Janine is Reading: 2022 YA Fantasies

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Only a Monster by Vanessa Len

This YA fantasy novel, Vanessa Len’s debut, was recommended highly by two people I trust, so I stuck with it even though it had a slow and seemingly pedestrian beginning. When Joan, a British East Asian girl, is little, her grandmother tells her that she is half-monster, but Joan doesn’t understand what that means until she accidentally time travels several hours into the future and learns that she did it at someone’s expense. In this book, which begins in modern-day London, monsters are time travelers who travel by stealing time from the end of other people’s lives. The humans don’t know their lifespan has been shortened, but the monsters can use that time to go that many days (or years) into the past or the future.

Joan was planning to meet Nick, a summer volunteer at the same museum house she works at, for a date when she traveled, and now she realizes she can never be with him. What if she accidentally steals time again, but this time from him? She can’t chance it, but though she wants to break up with him, she can’t quite do it. Nor can she open up to him.

All this ends when other monsters arrive at the house and proceed to attack them. Nick is knocked out and after the monsters decide to kill him and Joan. There’s a teen boy in the family who protests but then leaves when ordered to, and then Joan is attacked. Just then Nick comes to and defends them—not only that, he kills everyone else. He reveals that he is a monster hunter. The house is swarmed by others who work with him to eliminate monsters, but he promises to protect Joan if she stays put. He knows she’s not evil, but he also promises that he’ll kill her if she ever travels again.

When they were first attacked, Joan got a message to her family and they came to defend her. By the time she finds her grandmother and cousin, her grandmother is dying. In secret, her grandmother reveals that only Joan can stop “the hero” – a terrifying figure from their myths who kills all the monsters, aka Nick. Joan is about to come into a power that will help her do this, but she must never ever reveal that to anyone, not even her cousin Ruth.

Joan escapes but Ruth is stopped by the monster hunters. Joan runs into a maze on the property where she finds the monster boy who tried to protest that she shouldn’t be murdered being attacked. She knocks out his attacker, putting Aaron (the boy, whose relatives are enemies of her own) in her debt. Together the two of them travel to the 1990s—Aaron to escape and Joan to try to change the timeline so that none of her family members are killed. Only, Aaron tells her, the timeline cannot be changed. And traveling compromises Joan’s morals—even though she only steals a few days from each person to add up to the number of years she needs, that’s still the taking of life.

At first I thought this book would be nothing special. A YA trilogy with a romantic triangle and a girl with a special, mysterious power, what else is new? And Joan was initially so bland that she read like a placeholder character, a bit like Bella in Twilight. But oh, how wrong I was. There’s a method to Vanessa Len’s madness, because she takes these tropes and turns them on their head. Yes, Joan starts out ignorant and bland, but the experiences she undergoes over the course of the book forge her into the person she will be in the future—a young woman veering into adulthood, grappling with painful moral quandaries and a mystery about her past, haunted by what she has seen, done, and is learning.

Other side characters who come into the story later are also developed with depth. The two love interests are not, but I have reason to believe that will happen in the next book. And while the book has an unimpressive start, it gets better and better as it continues, and its ending is a tour de force. Despite the fact that it is the first book in a trilogy and there are many places to go from here, the ending also has a sense of closure. Best of all, this is a book that doesn’t shy away from moral dilemmas. This is an unsettling book, with an undercurrent of disturbing questions. Who is the monster and who is the hero? By the end of the book, Joan will discover that she is neither one. B+.

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Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

The gorgeous cover and a Goodreads article got me to pick up Adalyn Grace’s latest, Belladonna. This was the first of Grace’s books that I tried, and unfortunately it wasn’t for me.

Belladonna in a YA fantasy version of Victorian (there are trains!) England. The premise is interesting; the heroine is Signa, a young woman who can’t be killed. When she was a baby, everyone in her parents’ household was poisoned but baby Signa did not die. Death came to collect the dead, and he noticed that. Since then Signa has been shunted from relative to relative and in each household, her guardians die while she’s in their care.

Every so often, when Signa herself is on death’s doorstep or when someone else in her vicinity is, Signa sees Death and she has the capacity to speak to him. Signa hates him and blames him for her circumstances. Signa is less than a year away from collecting her inheritance and gaining her independence when she accidentally kills her latest guardian, an abusive distant aunt.

Signa lands with the last relative she has left. She’s determined to prevent anyone else from dying there so that she’ll have somewhere to stay while she’s sheltered.

(This didn’t make sense to me. She’s an heiress. Surely someone is managing her money and this same trustee would prevent her from ending up on the street?)

Signa lands on the doorstep of a family that is haunted by the death of their wife and mother. Literally haunted—the woman is a ghost who walks their mansion’s halls at night. Her husband throws wild parties in between grieving and feeling guilty. Her daughter, Signa’s age, is ill and bedridden. There are other relatives, and a stable hand, Sylas, who is a possible love interest. Death is another possible love interest.

One night, the ghost communicates with Signa and asks her to come to her garden. The garden is hidden and walled, but Signa finds a way through it—she eats belladonna and once near-dead, uses Death’s powers (which she can copy, she realizes) to pass through the wall. Of course she immediately recovers, but she does see Death then and he assures her he’s had nothing to do with the trail of deaths that has followed her and except in the case of the aunt she last lived with, doesn’t know who is behind them.

In the garden the ghost communicates with Signa that her daughter is being poisoned with belladonna and that she herself was killed in the same way. Signa decides she’ll have to find out who the poisoner is and stop the killing, and she promises to pay Sylas if he’ll help her.

The premise of Belladonna had some originality and I think I would might have liked the book (even though I’m not a fan of gothics) if I’d felt that it was well-executed. My biggest issues had to do with the writing, which felt artificial and stilted, and the worldbuilding, which wasn’t really consistent.

(For example, Signa reflected on how important it was for young women to behave with propriety and follow etiquette, but then she flouted those rules almost immediately afterward. Had Signa been clearly rebelling this would have worked better for me, but she didn’t seem to be so I was baffled. Why mention society’s rules if they aren’t really going to matter in any way? It felt like wallpaper worldbuilding. The same was true with the writing; some words were formal, others very modern. This should probably be tolerable in a fantasy novel, but for some reason it kept irritating me.)

The characters were just okay. Signa had potential but all of the above got in the way of my buying into her character. Sylas wasn’t interesting in any way in the section that I read. Death *was* interesting, but underdeveloped. Ultimately I lost interest and quit, but I did find out afterward about a twist that was pretty cool. DNF at 34%.

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Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore

Once upon a time I was a big Kristin Cashore fan, but then she wrote a couple of weaker books (Jane Unlimited was particularly bad). Last year’s Winterkeep had me hoping that Cashore was returning to form, this book tanked those hopes.

Seasparrow begins board ship, where Hava, queen Bitterblue’s secret half-sister and spy, is traveling home to Monsea along with her sister and Bitterblue’s lover, Giddon. Hava is enjoying learning about sailing but realizes that Kera, the first mate is sneaking into the hold at night and decides to find out what Kera is up to. Kera, it turns out, has been caging one of Winterkeep’s telepathic blue foxes. Hava rescues her and Kera tries to murder Hava to get her hands back on the fox, but is caught and stopped. Soon Hava discovers that the fox, whom she eventually names Hope, is pregnant.

The ship hits an iceberg and sinks, and that’s when Seasparrow turns into a survival-in-the-arctic type story. This novel had already had a slow start but this is where it started losing me in earnest. The ship’s captain is the leader of the journey home that the ragtag survivors begin, and she makes one ridiculously bad decision after another. In an obvious contrivance, no one questions whether she should continue to be their leader. Given that the queen was also on this trip, that made absolutely no sense. At one point, it becomes evident that the group turned in the wrong direction, but no one, not the captain, not the queen, and not Hava, suggests turning back.

There is a sweet romance between Hava and a gentle sailor her age, Linny, who clearly had an abusive past. Though he doesn’t know it, he and Hava have that in common. Hava was neglected as a child and witnessed some horrifying things; now she’s distrustful and occasionally angry. Over the course of the book that changes, but it takes far too long. In general the pacing of the book was very slow; it dragged for a long time.

Normally, I love a book where character interiority is a large feature and that character’s depths are plumbed. When Cashore does it well, she does it better than many other authors. She’s such a smart writer. However, here, (and in Winterkeep also) this went too far for too long. There’s a limit to how long I want to see a character’s psyche excavated no matter how good the writing is or how insightful the psychological acuity. Much of the characterization was good, but there was just so much of it. By the end of the book, I just wanted it to be over. Had Cashore not written a couple of terrific books in the past I would have quit.

To the book’s credit, at least the mystery of Kera and her theft of the fox was better paced. So was the stuff about Hope’s kits. It was lovely to see some of the characters bond with them—the little foxes sustained them at a time when hope and morale were in short supply.

I don’t know what to give this book because for much of it the characterization was good and I like Cashore’s prose, but at the same time, the book so long (624 pages) and the journey through the arctic so interminable that it tired me. C-, maybe? Possibly even a D, because I was glad the book was over when I finished reading. I think I’m done with feeling excited whenever a new Kristin Cashore book is announced.

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