There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.

Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends.

Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. The rules governing time travel and details about monster society are gradually revealed, with several questions left open for exploration in the next installment. The initial repetition of monster as Joan deliberates various meanings of the word is monotonous, but the story soon develops into a fast-paced thriller that blurs the division between villain and hero and features a deeply conflicted protagonist caught in the middle. They quickly learn that they are no safer in the past: Someone is hunting survivors throughout time and hiding evidence of the slaughter. Putting aside centuries of enmity between the Hunt and Oliver families, the two teens flee to the 1990s together, emerging in a time before either of them or the hero were born. Vulnerable and uneducated about the world of monsters, Joan allies with Aaron Oliver, a White boy who is the only other living monster she can find. This hero’s arrival in London and the subsequent massacre of monsters in the city come as a shock, most of all to 16-year-old Joan Chang-Hunt, who only recently discovered that she’d inherited her deceased White English mother’s monster lineage (her human father is Chinese Malaysian). Among monsters-beings with human appearances and the ability to travel through time by shortening humans’ life spans-there’s a myth about a human hero who threatens their entire existence.

Aaron oliver only a monster