ONLY A MONSTER

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.

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). 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. 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. They quickly learn that they are no safer in the past: Someone is hunting survivors throughout time and hiding evidence of the slaughter. 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. The rules governing time travel and details about monster society are gradually revealed, with several questions left open for exploration in the next installment.

An exciting urban fantasy.