This started out weird but charming, and ended up just weird.
Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.
However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she's found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen's eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don't think about love that way.
Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she's about to confess, Homily reveals why she's in the area: she's hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
Eating her girlfriend isn't an option. Shesheshen didn't curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily's twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.
And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.
I received an ARC and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.
I looooved that this book is writted from the perspective of the monster. It added a nice new perspective. Despite the objective gruesomeness of many of the monster qualities, it wasn't too abstract or horrific.
And I guess that's partially where the problem lay for me. In what I think was an effort to not make Sheshenshen unrelateable, I sometimes lost her monster-ness in favour of humanity. So often it was glossed over how her very human actions fit with her actually being not human at all.
Similarly, the book was rather humorous, but I wish it had taken itself a bit more seriously at parts.
It was also much more romantasy and much less horror than I anticipated. It wasn't scary, instead coming across as trope-y at times, and unfortunately not in the best way.
As I said, i was charmed in the first half of the book, but unfortunately it lost me in the second. It dragged on for a bit with no clear direction for the plot. This lack of direction even continued until after the main plot ended, and the book just... continues for several chapters. It was honestly one of the weirdest ways to wrap up a book that I have ever seen. It may have tried to close up all the threads, but instead just opened up a whole new can of worms, just to not quite know what to do with them, so it felt really half-baked.
Speaking of, I didn't find the characterizations particularly believeable or consistent. Some choices did not fit the characters at all.
Overall this was an interesting read, but not quite what I expected or wanted from it, with a decent execution that unfortunately didn't quite live up to itself.
Check out the book here.
~iam
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