Monsters by Ilsa J Bick

Monsters (Ashes, #3)

by Ilsa J Bick

The Hunger Games mixes with The Walking Dead in this post-apocalyptic YA series that comes to a hair-raising conclusion in Monsters.

The Changed are on the move. The Spared are out of time. The End...is now. When her parents died, Alex thought things couldn't get much worse―until the doctors found the monster in her head. She headed into the wilderness as a good-bye, to leave everything behind. But then the end of the world happened, and Alex took the first step down a treacherous road of betrayal and terror and death. Now, with no hope of rescue―on the brink of starvation in a winter that just won't quit―she discovers a new and horrifying truth. The Change isn't over. The Changed are still evolving. And...they've had help.

With this final volume of The Ashes Trilogy, Ilsa J. Bick delivers a riveting, blockbuster finish, returning readers to a brutal, post-apocalyptic world where no one is safe and hope is in short supply. A world where, from these ashes, the monsters will rise.

Reviewed by Angie on

2 of 5 stars

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I received an ARC through NetGalley.

To be quite honest, I didn't like this series. There were some amazing ideas, and awesome scenes, but overall, all three books are terribly boring. Monsters is huge, and it felt long and dragged out. I was hoping it would be better, since I did enjoy the ending of Shadows, but nope. It starts out with just about everyone being frozen, starving, and/or hallucinating. The story still jumps around like crazy, but at least this time I had a slightly better grasp on who most of the characters were. Sadly, I still had no investment in any of them, except Alex, and maybe Tom. Both of which didn't have enough pages, so I was skim reading more often than not.

The weirdest thing about this series was that it reads like one epically long book, rather than like a series. Neither of the sequels have any kind of recap; they just pick up where the last left off. Although, Monsters does have a glossary of characters. Too bad it's at the very end and I had no clue it was there! It would have served it's purpose had it been at the beginning, but since I had already finished slogging through the book, I didn't bother reading it.

Monsters is super slow in the first half. It's beyond boring despite there being a lot of violence and near death experiences. It just felt like the previous book happening all over again but with the characters in different locations. Plus it frustrated the heck out of me how close Alex, Tom, and Ellie were to each other, but kept conveniently missing one another. Then in the second half, it's pretty much nonstop action, lots more violence, and gore, and more evil conspiracies. For the most part I found a lot of the gore to be gratuitous. The author uses way too much detail in just about every aspect of the novel, which certainly doesn't help with pacing, or making me want to read further.

As a conclusion, Monsters left me with a lot of questions. Part of this is probably due to me not reading as carefully as I should have been, but the book really wasn't holding my attention. Plus the end is pretty open. I'm still not quite sure what was happening with The Changed and The Spared, and those caught in between. For once I would have liked a concrete ending rather than the cliffhangers the author had been giving us.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

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  • Started reading
  • 18 November, 2013: Finished reading
  • 18 November, 2013: Reviewed