All These Warriors by Amy Tintera Book Review

I’ve been an Amy Tintera fan for a long time. Her Reboot duology was one of my first big pleasures as a teenage reader, a love story of a warrior learning her humanity again. I was relatively impressed with her Ruined trilogy as well. It was incredibly easy to devour. Then All These Monsters really blew me away when I read it three years ago. And deciding to hype myself back up when I finally got the sequel, I reread the first book, and I don’t often do that. I enjoyed reintroducing myself to Clara, Edan, Patrick, Madison, Noah, Priya and the whole rest of the crew, and rereading the first book allowed me to go in all refreshed. But I guess my expectations were just way too high for my own good here.

Clara and her gang realized at the end of the first book that the company helping them take down the scrabs, these weird vile creatures that have forced several cities around the world to be abandoned, are actually being secretly made by them. And Clara’s boyfriend Julian was the mastermind. He still has feelings for her, but we’ve now seen what Julian is like when angry, and it would sure make me hesitant. The last time we saw Clara, she sent out a message to the world telling people all they witnessed, but there’s nothing concrete right now. They’re forced to flee from the other scrab hunters and continue their mission of exposure out of the spotlight. 

The end of All These Monsters made it sound like Clara and her friends would have to go on the run from the authorities and MTG, hiding away from Julian and the scrabs and trying to take the bigshots down when they had an opening. I guess that’s what I expected for years. But this book instead opens up with the characters going about what they’d been doing in the last book, only with somehow less thrills. Book One had them camping out in hotels to prepare for scrab battles, and they keep doing that on the record here, in spite of the fact Julian is out there and could potentially be monitoring transactions. When the characters talk about leaving for the holidays and being back in a couple weeks, I had to accept this just wasn’t going to be the big epic I was expecting. I guess I didn’t think these characters would be in a predicament innocent enough for them to consider getting on planes, on the record, and forgetting about their troubles for a while.

A book I’m writing right now is the second book in a series, like how this book is. The first book in my series takes the time to introduce the world and characters and conflicts, and the sequel is going to have a lot of it turned on its head and destroyed, with the protagonists having to go off grid, hiding from very powerful people trying to catch them in order to commit a morbid act. At the very least, All These Warriors reminded me what I really want to deliver in the second outing. Tintera has written plenty of pulse-pounding excitement, but this is, in my opinion, her least inspired work yet.

My grade: 2 stars out of 5