Never a Hero by Vanessa Len

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase using that link, a small commission is made from the sale. There are no additional costs to you.

Never a Hero by Vanessa Len
Only a Monster #2
Published by HarperTeen on August 29, 2023
Age Group & Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
Representation: Chinese-English protagonist
Format: eBook
Source: Library

Joan has saved her family and reset the timeline. Now, Nick is just an ordinary boy and Aaron is again her enemy. But Joan must find a way to re-gather her old allies when the real threat returns – the woman who created Nick. Eleanor, the most dangerous member of the Monster Court.

As the stakes rise—and Nick gets perilously closer to discovering the truth of what Joan did to him—Joan advances deeper into the monster world. When she’s captured by the Monster Court itself, she uncovers a secret of her own. She and Eleanor are the last members of a thirteenth monster family—a family erased from the timeline by the King. Eleanor has been fighting to restore them.

But when Joan glimpses the dark timeline their family once ruled over—and Nick’s role in it —she finds herself once again torn between love and family and monstrous choices as she battles to prevent Eleanor from bringing back their family and ushering in a terrible future.

Trigger & Content Warnings: fantasy xenophobia, racism (microaggressions), death, violence, interrogation

I didn’t have exactly have high hopes for Never a Hero considering how I felt about the first book, but sometimes the first book doesn’t mesh well with me at all while the second one turns out to be just perfect (and the third book even better). I was hoping Never a Hero would’ve been the case, but alas. It made me wish I dropped Only a Monster. Not only did it feel like a repeat of book one in a way, but it was intensified.

Maybe I was better off never having picked up the sequel after all. Just another series to the other series that I’ve abandoned somehow over the years. Because no amount of wanting to see how the sequel would unfold surpassed the amount of frustration this book put me in.

Never a Hero kicks off right where Only a Monster leaves off: Joan’s reset the timeline and unravelled Nick, so both her and Aaron’s family are alive again. Nick is now living an ordinary life, and Aaron is back to being her enemy. And (almost) no one remembers what truly happened except for Joan. She’s thinking she’s safe again, but she quickly finds out that’s not the case at all when the Monster Court comes hunting for her. Unfortunately for Nick, he gets dragged into the world and the two are on the run from the court.

Joan bugged me quite a bit in the first book, but I gave her leeway because 1) the girl was traumatized! She’s trying her best after getting flung into an unknown world! And 2) she’s a teenager and teens sometimes make poor decisions. And I’m sure as a teen someone also wanted to drop-kick me a lot few times, so when I’m reading YA nowadays as a mid-20s adult, I try to keep this in mind. Because at the end of the day, I’m not the audience anymore.

Oh, and I still make poor decisions as an adult sometimes. Just a little less poor than when I was like 16.

But I don’t know. When you’ve gone through and time travelled a few times already, I feel you would pick up a thing or two. Joan doesn’t — she does all the things she’s learned she shouldn’t do and then repeats it, like not trusting anyone as her Gran said in the first book, not even her Gran. She also thinks about things she shouldn’t do but then still does it anyway, like telling this version of Nick about monsters and time travelling. I honestly wanted to give her a good shake a few times.

But in her defense, Gran’s probably one of her comfort people and someone she can count on for safety, so she has the sliver of hope that she can trust Gran just like she has her entire life. And with Nick, there’s not an easy way to go around not telling him about the monster world when he’s dragged into the universe.

And let’s not begin how Joan is obsessed with Nick to the point of stalking him — it’s pretty much how the book opens up. In a way, I understand she’s curious about how things turned out for him since she essentially unravelled him to reset the timeline, and from what we got a glimpse of near the end of Only a Monster, I too, would want to see how Nick’s doing.

But daily? Nah, there’s nothing about him that makes me want to go check up on him daily. We got like 10% of him in the first book — all that we know of him is Joan admiring him constantly and how she’s so drawn to him. There’s just not much to say about Nick, or any of the characters, really. I do love some of the side characters like Ruth and Jamie, though.

I can’t really speak of the world-building and if it’s been improved upon in Never a Hero because I only got through 26% of the book. And honestly, I don’t think that’s sufficient to compare the world-building between the books. But while I enjoyed getting glimpses of the other families’ powers, a lot of the world from what I read is still just as the vague as Only a Monster. There was a lot of repetitiveness and dragging about, so the pacing felt bogged down.

The series has such a solid concept, and I genuinely wish I enjoyed it more. But I think all of that added on to my frustrations with Joan as a character just added into Never a Hero not working for me in the end.