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A review by wdianasheppard
No Beauties or Monsters by Tara Goedjen
3.0
"No Beauties or Monsters" is a YA science fiction thriller that hinges on missing memories and an unreliable narrator. Rylie moves back to a military base in the desert with her family, and is disheartened to learn that an old friend of hers has been missing, and a serial killer is out on the loose. Rylie's determination to find out what happened to her friend drives the narrative, which owes a lot to spooky desert vistas and shows like "Stranger Things" as she starts to hallucinate and lose chunks of time.
I was really excited to read this one, but I found it very difficult to follow because of the sheer number of characters. There were so many! While I appreciate that Rylie had multiple friends, I had to frequently turn back to their introductions to reference who was who and who knew who. Add in all the dangling threads (because of course Rylie's investigation turns up even more characters) and Rylie's own hallucinations as to what's real and what's not, and I was struggling through this one. I think if I read this one a second time I'd do much better with it, but for a first pass it wasn't easy.
Other reviewers have mentioned this book's killer twists, and I do agree - the ending is a lot of fun - but by the time I got there, I was exhausted from trying to keep up with the breakneck pace and all the plot threads. I think a tighter edit on this one might have saved it for me - in particular the love story is underbaked and unnecessary - but as it is, I'd recommend this to people interested in conspiracies and a protagonist slowly losing her mind.
I was really excited to read this one, but I found it very difficult to follow because of the sheer number of characters. There were so many! While I appreciate that Rylie had multiple friends, I had to frequently turn back to their introductions to reference who was who and who knew who. Add in all the dangling threads (because of course Rylie's investigation turns up even more characters) and Rylie's own hallucinations as to what's real and what's not, and I was struggling through this one. I think if I read this one a second time I'd do much better with it, but for a first pass it wasn't easy.
Other reviewers have mentioned this book's killer twists, and I do agree - the ending is a lot of fun - but by the time I got there, I was exhausted from trying to keep up with the breakneck pace and all the plot threads. I think a tighter edit on this one might have saved it for me - in particular the love story is underbaked and unnecessary - but as it is, I'd recommend this to people interested in conspiracies and a protagonist slowly losing her mind.