Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Release Date: July 7, 2020
Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
Source: Library
Genre: Young Adult / Science Fiction
From New York Times best-selling author Amy Tintera, a
high-stakes sci-fi adventure about a teen girl who will do anything to
escape her troubled home—even if that means joining a dangerous
monster-fighting squad. Perfect for fans of Warcross and Renegades.
Seventeen-year-old
Clara is ready to fight back. Fight back against her abusive father,
fight back against the only life she’s ever known, and most of all,
fight back against scrabs, the earth-dwelling monsters that are
currently ravaging the world. So when an opportunity arises for Clara to
join an international monster-fighting squad, she jumps at the chance.
When
Clara starts training with her teammates, however, she realizes what
fighting monsters really means: sore muscles, exhaustion, and worst of
all, death. Scrabs are unpredictable, violent, and terrifying. But as
Clara gains confidence in her battle skills, she starts to realize
scrabs might not be the biggest evil. The true monsters are the ones you
least expect.
Author Amy Tintera's All
These Monsters is the first book in an expected duology featuring a ragtag
group of monster fighters and a shocking twist that will leave readers craving for
the second book. 17-year old Clara Pratt is the main character. She lives in
Dallas, Texas with her mom, brother, and abusive father. After being physically
abused by her dad, she decides she’s had enough. After years of her mother and
brother refusing to speak up and doing nothing, she decides to leave home after
reading about Grayson St. John's International Fight Squad.
This is a group that
hunts monsters known as Scrabs and is looking for new recruits. So, after making
her way through the process, Clara boards a bus to Atlanta where Grayson trains
new recruits and puts together teams that will end up traveling to Paris where
the Scrabs are out in full force. Clara is the weakest on her team but makes it
through and bonds with her team including one of the teams so called leaders,
Julian, as well as Edan who is very much like Clara, and Madison who is Grayson’s
sister. The first thing that Clara learns is that training is hard, and not
everyone is going to survive once they encounter real world situations.
In this world,
everyone in High School is expected to take combat training to fight Scrabs
which are Earth-dwelling monsters that rampage thru cities across the world.
Apparently, around 2013, Scrabs made their first appearance in this
world. Scrabs are hard to describe because there's several different types
of them. Apparently, Scrabs have not been seen in the US in ages, and Russia
has closed itself off from the rest of the World. They tunnel underground and
pop up in heavy populated areas killing and destroying anything they come
across. The U.S. has mostly gotten it under control, but in Europe, they are
heavily infested.
Europe is where most of this story take place. First in Paris where Clara and Edan learn a secret about the competition MDG (Monster Defense Group) and their plans for the Scrabs. Later in London where the Scrabs are plenty busy terrorizing those who still live in the city, and Clara realizes not everyone is who they seem, and some are more dangerous than others. Even though Clara is allegedly the weakest on her team, somehow, she manages to survive through a series of brutal attacks whereas some of her teammates aren't so lucky. She finds that she can easily connect with Edan because he makes her a better fighter whenever he's around.
In the vein of bestsellers like Warcross and Renegades, All These Monsters has accessible science fiction elements that tackle today’s issues like teen activism, and toxic relationships. What appears to be a dystopian science-fiction adventure turns out fundamentally to be about a young woman’s emotional path to transcendence over the cycle of abuse. Tintera balances heart-pounding action with compelling connections between Clara and her teammates, all told through snappy dialogue and prose. It is fair to say that this book ends on a cliffhanger ending which shouldn’t surprise anyone since it’s a duology, not a standalone.
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1
The
bag slammed into my body, and I hit the mat with a grunt. I flipped
over, scrambling to my knees as I tried to find the weapon that just
flew out of my hand.
Four claws appeared at my throat. A loud buzzer sounded.
Dead.
I flopped back on the mat, letting out an annoyed huff of air.
That was embarrassing. I didn’t even make it thirty seconds that round.
“You have one more life,” the voice on the intercom said. “Do you want to take a break first?”
I got to my feet and turned to where a large, skeptical man named
Bubba watched me through the window. I considered telling him to forget
about the last life. Surely I’d humiliated myself enough for one day.
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine.”
Bubba made a face like, wow, she’s an idiot. I was very familiar with this expression.
He pressed a button on his computer, and the practice dummy
retracted, squeaking as it zipped along the track mounted to the
ceiling.
I put my hands on my hips as I took a deep breath.
Four lives, and I died within two minutes each round. I really was an
idiot. Bubba was a good judge of character.
“You sure you don’t want the body pads, Clara?” Bubba asked over the intercom. “You took a pretty big hit just now.”
“No.” I shook out my shoulders. “I don’t need pads.” Pads were for
football players. I’d never had padding to protect me from a hit.
“The girls usually take the pads,” he said. “Especially . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t need to. Especially the girls
who didn’t look tough. Especially the girls with their dark brown hair
in French braid pigtails and breasts that were made to hold up dresses,
not jump around fighting monsters. I really shouldn’t have been doing
this in a regular bra. Sorry, boobs.
“I don’t need pads,” I said again.
“All right. Ready?” Bubba asked over the intercom.
“Yeah.”
“Sword.” Bubba sounded like he’d lost what little faith he had in me.
I grabbed my sword from the mat. It wasn’t actually a sword, just a
plastic tube that looked like it belonged on a vacuum cleaner. It had a
light on the end that glowed green if I hit a weak spot. I’d only seen
it light up once, briefly.
The buzzer sounded, indicating that I had five seconds to prepare. I tightened my grip on my vacuum attachment.
There were four practice dummies hanging from the ceiling, but I’d
picked a level one session, so only one jolted away from the wall. It
was made out of a large punching bag with plastic arms attached,
complete with four-inch claws at the end.
It looked cheap, and stupid. Until it started moving.
The dummy flew at me, metal screeching as it zoomed forward. It
was made to approximate a real scrab, and it moved incredibly fast.
Claws sliced through the air. I stumbled backward, the mat squishing beneath my feet.
The dummy’s body swung side to side as it raced along the track,
claws outstretched. I ducked beneath its arms and darted around it. I’d
clearly surprised it, because it took a second for it to swing around.
I jumped forward, thrusting the sword at its neck. I saw the green
light, but only for a second. I hadn’t put enough force behind the
weapon for a kill shot.
I barely pulled my hand back in time to
miss getting dinged by plastic claws. I spun and ran, ready to swerve
and surprise it again—
The bag slammed into my back, sending me
crashing into the wall. I hit it so hard that I could have sworn the
wall shook. That was going to leave a bruise.
“Whoa, are you—”
Bubba’s voice cut out as I jumped away from the wall and dashed
around the dummy. It swung to face me, all ten claws stretching for my
face. I launched at it, throwing my sword into its neck as hard as I
could.
The sword glowed bright green. The dummy’s arms dropped. A pleasant dinging sound echoed through the room.
I won. I killed it.
“Congrats, darlin’,” Bubba said over the intercom. He didn’t actually sound all that happy for me. “You sure can take a hit. Last guy in here cried after round two.”
I blew my bangs out of my eyes. I could definitely take a hit. One of my few talents.
And I could kill a dummy pretending to be a scrab one in five times.
I watched as the dummy retracted. If I’d had more money, I might
have asked Bubba to give me another full set of lives. I wanted to pound
the vacuum attachment into that fake scrab until it was thoroughly
dead.
“Meet me up front,” Bubba said.
The dummy took its place at the back of the room, and I dropped my sword into its charger on the wall.
I walked out of the simulation room and down the hallway to the
front desk. Bubba’s Combat Training and Games wasn’t much to look at,
inside or out. It was a squat, windowless building on the side of the
highway, the kind of place that might be the last thing you saw before
you died. The front room consisted of a few metal chairs, a desk, and
walls covered in flyers advertising various services.
European Vacation Special
Buy 5 defense classes for the family and get 2 free!
Weapons, Armor, and Guns
What works, and what doesn’t. Free book with class!
Florida Beach Tips
Learn to spot scrabs in the sand.
The
last one was a couple years old. There hadn’t been a scrab sighting in
Florida for a long time. They were rarely spotted anywhere in North
America these days. It had been three months since the last one, in
South Carolina, and the National Guard had shown up almost immediately
to whisk it away.
Bubba must never have removed old flyers,
because I spotted a bunch of old stuff—the announcement requiring Texas
high school students to take combat class instead of gym, a seminar
discussing scrab origin theories, even a newspaper article from 2013
about the attack in New Orleans, with a photo of President Obama
standing amongst the wreckage. The walls were more history than
advertising.
“All right, Clara,” Bubba said as he walked
through the door and sat down at his desk. He pushed aside a coffee mug.
“That’ll be twenty.”
I dug the bill out of my pocket,
flattening it with my hand against the counter before handing it over.
Bubba whisked it into a box in the top drawer of the desk. I swallowed
as I watched it disappear. With the exception of a few quarters, that
was all the money I had. I’d been saving that twenty for months.
The television mounted on the wall above my head was silently playing the news, and Bubba glanced up at it. The words Grayson St. John and Elite Fighting Squad
scrolled across the bottom of the screen, beneath a photo of three
scrabs standing over a destroyed food cart in Beijing. The scrabs looked
a bit different depending on the region—in Asia they were large,
typically six or seven feet tall, with enormous bodies covered in
spikes. They ran on all fours and mostly used their massive mouths full
of fangs to fight. Scrabs in Europe and the UK fought on two legs and
made better use of their front claws. North American scrabs were a mix
of both, but everyone said ours were smaller and kind of sluggish
compared to the rest of the world.
I wondered which version Bubba had modeled his dummy after.
“You thinking of joining?” Bubba asked.
“Uh, I don’t know.” I was too embarrassed to say yes.
He squinted at me, running a hand over his dark beard. “You got any special skills or anything?”
“No.” I tilted my head. “Well, maybe. Is surviving a special skill?”
“I guess?” Bubba said it skeptically, probably thinking of my four
deaths he’d just witnessed. But Bubba didn’t know. Not really.
“Yeah, I’ve got that, then. Not dying. That’s what I’m good at.”
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