Twisted timelines, people who come back after having been murdered, multiple iterations of the boy she loves, not to mention the one who helped her when she was on the run in the prior timeline. All of this is layered with treachery, secrets, and an ending that's a cliffhanger ( )

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
From the author’s website:

Death

Violence

Mind control and brainwashing

Weapon use

Interrogation

Real-world racist microaggressions


In Never a Hero, Joan is living in a timeline that she created by unmaking the hero, Nick, the boy that she fell in love with. The boy who murdered her family. At the end of Only a Monster we were left wondering what would happen to Nick, and Len doesn’t leave us hanging. He appears on the first page of Never a Hero, having popped back into Joan’s life as a student at her school. His entire history has been remade, his family now alive. What hasn’t changed is Joan’s feelings for him, and once again Nick is drawn to Joan, completely unaware of their history.

When someone attacks Joan at her job at a bakery they end up stuck together on the run. As they try to work out what is going on, and who’s after Joan, the chance that Nick might find out everything is terrifyingly high. As Joan struggles to keep her secrets, and stay safe, she gets some help from some familiar faces. But one familiar face isn’t amongst them. Aaron warned her that if they ever met again they would be enemies, and he was right; he’s one of the people hunting her down.

While I enjoyed Never a Hero, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu and not in a positive way because the problem is we’ve been through all this before, dear reader. It’s a slightly different plot, but essentially book two is a rehash of book one. That’s not to say there’s no interesting scenes, and there’s some great dialogue in there. However, as a Doctor Who fan I’ve been spoiled with some amazing time travel plots and quite frankly this just doesn’t cut it for me.

I was also intensely aware that this book was written by a non-British author, which was surprising as I loved the attention to details in the first book. The first thing I noticed was the way that Len referred to Nick as captain of the football team, a very American attitude as captains of our sports teams do not have nearly as much celebrity status in UK school hierarchies. Then, when they were in a historical period, it takes Joan a moment to realise that people are staring at her and believes it is because she is mixed race. It felt a little odd that she was so surprised to find racism in a historical period when I’m aware of how racist modern London is, especially post-pandemic. I feel that sometimes people look at the UK and don’t realise that it can be as racist as other countries just because it’s not talked about as much.

One of the aspects I enjoy about the Monsters series so far is the powers that Len has created for her universe. They are diverse and interesting, however, in Never a Hero she introduces a new power of one of the families. I’m going to pop this under a spoiler tag before I go any further.


The Liu family have the power to remember anything perfectly and in Never a Hero we gain some more information about how this works exactly. They gather information from any available source, such as phone records, CCTV, social media, drone photos and databases, and they only need to see something once to remember every detail perfectly. It is then added to the memory of the entire Liu family.

It makes sense then that some of them have the ability to remember previous timelines as those memories would be stored in their collective memories. In Never a Hero Len introduces an additional power, the ability to remember things that haven’t happened yet. Yes, that is as it sounds; they can see the future timeline. While this makes for an interesting plot, I’m not quite sure how it’s justified in a world-building sense as we’ve suddenly jumped from perfect memory to clairvoyance which is a completely different thing.


I did find the big reveal of the big bad to be as tension filled and thrilling as it should be. I did see some things coming, and then well and truly had the wool pulled over my eyes! It was that ending that saved this book for me, and makes me hopeful for the third (and final?) book. While Never a Hero was rocky in places I have high hopes for the third book out next year!

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