Publication Date: August 29th, 2023
Read: August 29th - 30th, 2023
Rating: 4/5 stars
Never a Hero is the sequel to Only a Monster and the second book of the Monsters trilogy by Vanessa Len. As I mentioned in my August wrap-up, I tried really hard to get an ARC of Never a Hero, because I liked Only a Monster so much, but it proved impossible. It turned out that Harpercollins wasn’t doing any ARCs at all for Never a Hero, even digital ones. This was a tragedy of epic proportions. But they sent me a finished copy, which was nice!
There are big spoilers for Only a Monster and mild spoilers for Never a Hero ahead, so…watch out!
In Only a Monster, we saw Joan try to save her family from a massacre, which culminated in her “unmaking” a fabled monster hunter in order to change the timeline and make it so the massacre never happened. We also found out that said monster hunter (Nick) just might have been Joan’s true love in another timeline – the original timeline. So that makes this timeline #3, and it lets us look at what happens…if there was Never a Hero.
Sorry, sorry, that was a little cheesy.
Never a Hero is about what happens when Joan and Nick are once again thrown together and caught up in the monster world – but this time, Nick doesn’t know anything about monsters, he just knows that he’s drawn to Joan and weird stuff is going down. Joan fully remembers the previous timeline, which means she remembers, among other things, Nick orchestrating the massacre that killed her entire family. She’s terrified to tell him anything about the monster world, because she doesn’t know if the wrong piece of information will set him back on a path to becoming The Hero again. Meanwhile, court guards lead by Aaron Oliver are hunting them down, and meeting up with old friends like Jamie and Tom just makes things more complicated. Oh, and the mysterious blonde woman who made Nick into the Hero in the first place seems to have something to do with all of this.
This is a very introspective follow-up to Only a Monster, which I largely appreciate. Joan’s experiences in the first book were pretty traumatic, and the fact that no one but her remembers everything that happened only adds to the psychological burden. It was really interesting seeing her internal struggles about interacting with Nick. She can’t help but like him, she knows he doesn’t remember what she remembers, but she also can’t help be scared of him, because he killed her family and countless others.
My one criticism of this aspect of this book is I would have liked to see Joan have to confront her complicated feelings about Nick more to Nick? He gradually picks up information and pieces things together, but at some point I would have liked there to be a full conversation about it, instead of the many conversations in which Joan is holding back information out of fear. There’s still room for that in the next book, though.
Nick as the normal (or is he?!) guy is probably one of the most significant additions to this book’s supporting cast. I mean, he was in the first book, but I don’t know if antagonists are considered part of the supporting cast. It’s sort of an inherently unsupportive role.
Nick reminds me a lot of Orion Lake, which I think makes sense, given that they’re both thematic deconstructions of hero archetypes. Nick is a little more Captain America/Superman to Orion’s Percy Jackson/Harry Potter, but there are definitely still some similarities there. I enjoyed seeing Nick react to different situations, do his best to help people and reassure Joan, and try to piece things together while missing crucial information about who he used to be. I think Vanessa Len did a good job of making him interesting to read about when he doesn’t know stuff, and also making it very interesting to see him figure stuff out with not a lot of information. What Nick knows and doesn’t know is a big part of the ongoing tension of this story and it propels Joan’s internal struggle a lot.
I’m a little neutral on where we end up with Nick, but I feel like that’s mostly because this is a second installment that’s setting up a lot of resolutions that are going to come in the third book. So it’ll be interesting to see where Nick and Joan go from here. I’m not particularly interested in them as a couple, but I am interested in them as former soulmates who will never be able to be together romantically because of what’s happened. I’d like to see if they can be friends, despite everything.
As for what couples I AM interested in…I’m still rooting for the Aaron/Joan side of this love triangle, even though we got a lot less of Aaron in this book. The fact that Joan is the only person who staunchly believes that Aaron isn’t a backstabbing snake is sweet (although I did slightly question why that was enough to make him fully join the team), and I really liked seeing him help Joan ground herself again when she’s yearning to time travel. I hope we’ll get a lot more of Aaron in the third book, since we won’t be beginning that book with him having no memories and trying to hunt Joan down.
Now I have some critiques and less positive comments to get into.
It kind of feels like Vanessa Len felt like she had written herself into a corner by having so few characters remember any of the events of Only a Monster. A lot of this book is spent recapping the previous book not just to the reader, but to the characters, who mostly have new memories to go along with the new timeline. In a way, it’s nice to not need to reread the previous book to understand this one, but it began to feel like the writing over-relied on repetition and overused recap. Often, things that are being said to Joan would be repeated in her inner narration later on to remind the reader, sometimes only a chapter or two later. The repetition and recap definitely crossed the line from helpful to overbearing at times. This is something that probably just needed tighter editing.
There were some ways in which the plot felt a bit repetitive as well. Twice in this book, Nick is placed under a compulsion to prevent him from harming monsters. The first time it happens, Joan is hugely against it happening and argues that it's violating (plus she's scared because if Nick becomes a monster hunter again, this another thing for him to hold against them). The second time, Joan goes along with it, and it felt like the second instance was just there to provide an opportunity for Joan to "betray" Nick and then feel guilty about it. I think there could have been more effective ways for Joan to be put in a situation in which she feels she has to betray Nick to protect monsters, or even for her to be forced to seem to betray him. That particular moment was just a little weak for me.
I think this book suffers a little from not only being the second book in a trilogy, but also Vanessa Len’s second book in general. Or at least, Never a Hero is her second published book. Who knows how much unpublished material she has, right? But I bring this up because I think this book has a little bit of a case of both Second Book (in a series) Syndrome and Sophomore Slump. For the record, I still really liked this book, but I do think it is noticeably weaker than Only a Monster and has more instances of awkward writing, like the repetition. Certain descriptions are also used enough to become pretty noticeable, like Nick being compared to a comic book hero or Aaron constantly looking like he's just stepped off a red carpet.
Also, there’s a number of plot threads that seem like they’re being set up for the third book, which means that they don't get fully addressed in this book, so we’re left with some unresolved questions and perhaps fewer satisfying answers than in Only a Monster. We do get some answers and some more information about this world, but since some of it is stuff I had already guessed and some of it is conveyed through a lot of villainous exposition, it wasn’t as thrilling as, say, Joan realizing that she and Nick are drawn to each other because they’re soulmates from a previous timeline. For instance, we learn that there was once a thirteenth monster family, but this isn't a super surprising twist when we already know that Joan has a forbidden power that must have come from somewhere.
Additionally, the climax of this book involves a lot of villain monologuing and villainous exposition. I’m not generally a fan of villain monologues where the villain explains their entire plan and motivations, so…This was maybe one of my least favorite parts. It feels like everyone is just standing around for pages and pages while the villain talks and monologues, and we have no emotional connection to this villain (by design) so it’s just like…okay! It’s kind of funny, because this is probably exactly how some of the other characters felt when Joan was explaining the previous timeline to them. This whole sequence definitely didn't have the impact on me that it could have, though, so that was unfortunate.
I have a feeling that Vanessa Len has some interesting things in store for the third book, so I’m still very much looking forward to it. On the one hand, it's a bummer that this book feels the weaker for being set-up for the third book. On the other hand, the third book is poised to potentially be very interesting! Thus is the tragedy of the second book in a series. Here’s hoping that Never a Hero will be the weakest installment to a good trilogy, and that the third book will be a really good conclusion.
Does anyone have any guesses on what the title of the third book will be? I'm guessing it'll start with "Always" or maybe "Ever." Only, Never, Always just has a nice progression to it.
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