Monsters by Ilsa J. Bick | Book Review

*This review might contain spoilers*

The Changed are on the move. The Sparred 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 quite–she discovers a new and horrifying truth.

The Change isn't over.
The Changed are still evolving.
And…they've had help.

One thing I love books to have is a few pages that catch you up on the events of the last book in the series. In Monsters, the first page is a who-was-when-and-where-at-the-end-of-Shadows kind of thing. Then, at the back of the book there's a few pages devoted to the characters, I guess you'd call them mini bios. These two things are extremely helpful! The fact that the author thought to add those in is like the cherry on top of a book sundae (let's be honest, we all want there to be such things as book sundaes).

Now, onto some bad news. This book is a DNF: Did Not Finish. Why, you may ask? This is not due to the quality of the writing or anything like that, it's just because I wasn't really interested in reading this book. It didn't capture my attention like the two previous books in the trilogy, and I didn't want to spend time reading a book I didn't want to read in the first place. 

Books are created for enjoyment, exploring new worlds, explaining your views on things, and I don't want to waste time reading books I don't enjoy when I could be enjoying exploring new worlds. I'm still going to feel guilty when I put a book down and don't pick it back up, because I always believed that you had to finish a book when I was little; no other way around it. However, there is. With the Ashes trilogy, you don't have all your burning questions answered and tied up in a cute package with bows. There's yelling at the pages and pulling your hair, because you're left with more burning questions. While that can be feels-inducing, I just got annoyed at this series once I looked over the books again. 

To be honest, I just got bored and did something naughty. I have a habit of reading a quarter(ish) of a book, then reading the last page. I don't normally regret this, but I definitely regret spoiling the last page of Monsters. It screwed with my head and my preconceived understanding of the Ashes trilogy, and I just didn't like how the protagonist ended up, so I stopped reading. This could be a metaphor for my life, omg. Anyway, yeah I skipped ahead to read the last page and got a nasty surprise. Didn't like what I saw.

The book itself is, of course, amazingly written. Ilsa has a brilliant talent for writing and creating vivid worlds for readers to dive into. While I feel like some characters have abrupt stories or could be kind of pointless, the main characters are brilliant. I love the romance between Tom & Alex, and the lovely people they meet on their journeys. I just didn't connect with the characters at all, which is disappointing in any novel.

Monsters is a hit 'n' miss kind of book; you'll either like it or you won't and there's no telling which boat you'll fall into. Personally, this book just isn't for me and I'm ultimately glad I put it back on the shelf. That doesn't mean I won't feel guilty for doing so, but a booklover shouldn't read books she hates; hence the term booklover. 

~zì jiàn!~