Center for Teaching & Learning

First off, a warning: if you don’t like gore in your books then don’t bother to read this review.
Wilson’s screams abruptly ended in a gurgling report and a veritable geyser of blood, most of which cascaded from a robust stream into the monster’s waiting mouth. His head fell forward with a sickening thud onto the metal bars. A final paroxysmal spasm of his legs and Wilson lay still.
Will Henry is a sixteen-year-old orphan who works for a man with an unusual practice: monstrumology, or the study of monsters. His master, Doctor Warthrop, is obsessed with this and brings Will Henry on a gory, painful, and also violent adventure to hunt down and examine a type of monster called the Anthropophagi, thought to be extinct, which has recently begun to come out of hibernation and started to eat humans. This book is set in a world just like ours; the one crucial difference being that there is a chance that monsters are lurking around every corner. Soon a simple examination mission becomes a fight for the survival of millions of others.
I loved the way Yancey developed Will as a character. When the book starts Will shies away from everything, but by the end he is an exuberant character who readers can still relate to—aside from the fact that he hunts monsters. It was a good choice by Yancey to change Will as a character because readers focus more on the problem rather than trying to understand what the character was thinking.
Yancey also did a good job of developing the secondary character: Doctor Warthrop. Even though his personality didn’t change throughout the book, at the beginning his personality completely offsets Will’s, which is an effective choice. I also liked Doctor Warthrop as a character because his personality contrasts with Will’s, in multiple ways, one of them being his professionalism in monstrumology. He is very good at monstrumology because he has done it his whole life, whereas Will is new to it. I appreciated Yancey’s choice to make this contrast. It made the book more effective for me.
I thought that the secondary problem of Will trying to gain Doctor Worthrop’s respect was an effective addition by Yancey. It was nice to sometimes not be immersed in the violent world of monstrumology and get a chance to learn more about the character’s personalities. I thought that it was a good choice by Yancey to have one problem be action-packed, gory adventure and one problem be a little less heavy and a little bit slow-moving. Whenever I would consider stopping, Yancey would draw me back into the book with another action scene. I appreciated the balance of action and character development.
This book was an 11 out of 10 for me and many others. Yancey brought me out of my house and into a new world where anything is possible, good or bad. I encourage anyone and everyone to at least give this book a shot and enter a different world.
Henry
Simon & Schuster, 434 pages