Man... This was so disappointing. I was so hooked by the amazing first ~100 pages of the book I thought every reviewer was insane. How could you not like this?! For the first section of the book, I thought it would've been an easy 4 or even 5 stars. Great characters, great dialogue, fantastic art, and an interesting story even. Then, as I delved into the rest of the book, I thought oh no...

Monsters does something I hope no book should do. It leaves us at a cliffhanger and spends half the book giving backstories to characters that aren't very important. The next ~200 pages of the book is the backstory of the main character's mother. Barely anything interesting happens. It's 200 pages that could've easily been condensed to just 20! When the book spends more time giving context for the plot than the actual plot itself, you know something is wrong.

I get it, it ties into the plot. Everything's connected and all, but the payoff is seriously not worth the insanely repetitive story in this middle half of the book. There's even long-winded cursive monologues in the form of Ms. Bailey's diary, and all of them are some variation of "My husband is back but he's treating me poorly and things aren't how they used to be. :(". 200 pages of this.

By the time we're back to the present, I was already feeling like I wanted the book to end. Sure enough, it does. The last 60 or so pages wrap up the story in a weirdly anticlimactic way. Nothing really happens. I can't say more without spoiling.

In the end it wasn't a bad book, just misleading. I didn't want 150 pages of Ms. Bailey being sad. I didn't want 50 pages of a sappy romance backstory. There's a 5/5 story hidden here somewhere, if the author had decided not to make Monsters tediously long and actually focus on the characters we wanted to see. It's a shame.