Only a Monster, by Vanessa Len

Joan, the daughter of an English mother (deceased) and a Malaysian father, learns as a child that her mother's family is unusual. They call themselves monsters, and can do what appears to be genuine magic, if of a minor variety: they can make small objects appear and disappear. Joan can also do this as a child, but the ability fades away as she grows up. By the time she's sixteen, it's gone and she's relegated the whole monster-and-magic thing to the realm of "my eccentric family has weird beliefs."

Needless to say, there's a lot more to it than that.

Only a Monster is a YA fantasy that partakes in some current YA tropes (the love triangle) and does its own thing in other ways. Unusually for a modern YA, the worldbuilding is excellent and original. The monsters have their own society, with families who have different abilities, mostly of a pleasingly eccentric and small-scale variety. Because the powers aren't world-shattering, there's a good amount of figuring out how to use them in clever ways. I LOVE this kind of thing, and it's very well-done.

There's another power that all the monsters have. It's time travel, of a very unique variety and with a real and disturbing cost. I've never come across this exact variant on time travel before, and the worldbuilding around it and the society than grew around people who can do it is also extremely well-done. The plot is mostly very good, with some excellent twists and surprises.

The flaw in the book is that two of the three main characters are not very interesting. This didn't at all ruin the book for me - I enjoyed it a lot - but it's definitely the sort of book where the supporting cast is enormously more interesting than the leads.

Joan is kind of an everygirl figure and she feels more there as a vehicle to tell the story than a three-dimensional character. She often refuses to listen to people trying to tell her information she really needs to know when that serves the plot, but is very clever and quick-witted when that serves the plot.

The other issue is the love triangle. One of the boys accompanies Joan for almost the whole book, and we see their relationship grow from strangers to enemies to friends to could-be-lovers. This really worked for me. The other one is someone she had a crush on before the book starts, we get a tiny bit of very dramatic interaction at the beginning, and then he's off-page for most of the book, but we're told that their love could move worlds, etc. This didn't work for me.

Bizarrely, there is another love story, between supporting characters, in which the characters are almost never in the same place at the same time, and I was REALLY invested in that one. Maybe it worked better because it was pushed less hard? But it was a very difficult technical feat to pull off, and it was executed beautifully.

This book has a satisfying "settled for now" ending, but the story clearly continues. I'll be following it, because I LOVE the world and the supporting cast is great.

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