Monstrous

by Marcykate Connolly

[KitsuneBae]

Monstrous has all the ingredients to be an amazing book but sadly, the result was less than delicious. We have an amnesiac heroine, Kymera, who basically came back from the dead and found herself only functional due to the fact that she’s a patchwork of different animal parts put together. This fact didn’t bother her, however, for she is naïve and pure at heart. All she ever wanted is to put her new capabilities to good use. Good use means saving the kingdom of Bryre and its young girls from an evil wizard, Barnabas. As I’ve said, Monstrous knew where to start but apparently, got lost during the journey.

Monstrous was off to a nice start introducing us to our brave but naïve little heroine, Kymera and her father who’s a brilliant scientist. Everything was going well in the first 30% of the book and then, it just went downhill. For a book that targets a middle grade audience, Monstrous really needs some humor to spice things up. I think monotonous would be more apt to describe this book. If you’re up to it, feel free to fill me in with some parts of the book that I’ve missed because I swear, I did drift off for some time reading this.

It’s not only the monotony that bothered me but also my lack of sympathy for our characters. I liked Kymera at first but then, as I spent time with her, I felt that we could never be friends. She’s just too-good to be true. The side characters including the love interest, Ren and the villain weren’t interesting at all. The relationships between our characters were almost non-existent. Given where the story of Monstrous is going, I think there would be heartbreaking confrontations and heartwarming reunions but all I got was dialogues that felt so awkward. The plot was so predictable despite the fact that you can see how the author was trying to make it otherwise. Too many clues were left that the author might as well have announced the twist on the first chapter. And that ending...why?.

The chapter illustrations were, however, beautiful and the world building adequate but I don’t think that these are enough to compensate for the pain that this book gave me.