1 out of 4 stars
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The Different Kinds of Monsters is a book that follows the two life stories of an ancient Allosaurus, Emily, and a man named Dylan Armitage. Dylan’s family dynamics transform over the time they spend on the road running from the ghost of the dinosaur. His nomadic experiences as a child and teenager feed into his adulthood. The author, Seth Chambers, brings up and attempts to answer the questions of who and what makes a monster, and how people struggle with their inner demons.
The concept is a fresh and interesting one; a ghost dinosaur connected mysteriously to one family’s bloodline. This is what made me excited to read the book, and what kept me reading. I enjoyed the originality of the presented mystery, and the book was at its strongest when it remembered this central conflict. However, the majority of the pages are dedicated to detailing Dylan’s entire childhood. The more I read, the more it felt like I was waiting for the book to catch up with the present and get back to the plot. It plants plenty of seeds for Dylan’s inner demons as an adult, but spends little time by the end to harvest them and explore the theme of being a monster.
The author brings in all sorts of deplorable characters to show the evil side of humanity, but doesn’t challenge the standards by which society labels someone evil. The majority of the ‘bad guys’ were one-dimensional and lacked any intrinsic, complex motivation to their actions against Dylan. If the purpose was to show that monsters don’t have reasons, then the author was not clear enough on this point. In addition, the crimes these characters committed are difficult to paint as a morally grey issue. This takes away from any kind of complex discussion about the labelling of a monster and doesn’t challenge our current norms.
The author wants us to question who a monster is. He does this by having the main character commit taboo actions and crimes of sexual and physical natures, while still creating empathy in the audience by exploring his past. While the main character has some internal ethical conflicts over such actions, his self-doubt ends there. There is no revelation, no major character change, and no semblance of an answer to the raised questions. At the end, I was left feeling that nothing had changed and wondering why the book was written.
I give this book a 1 out of 4 stars because I felt unsatisfied by the story’s arc and the lack of complexity in the characters. The writing itself, like the descriptions and sentence structures, was smooth but it did little to inspire more into the book. I wasn’t able to find any grammatical errors. I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone because of the issues above.
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The Different Kinds Of Monsters
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