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5 effing Stars for Monsters of Men and 4.9 Stars for the entire series.

WOW....just Wow. This is one of those books or actually it is an entire series that I will have the most difficult time putting into words how fantastic it is.


There are so many great moments and beautiful writing that I'm amazed by it all.

The thing about war is there is never a winner. Both sides lose; the winner is the one that loses the least. Ness did a fantastic job of showing the lengths that people go to for what they determine to be right. There is always a justification, a reason or a sense of logic for what must be done. Ness shows how that applies to all sides and he does it in a way that you can empathize with all sides and then at the same time be angry with them. Every side has good and bad people and Todd and Viola are small cogs in a machine just trying to make all the parts work together to be better. They are striving for peace against those who want to use war to get it.

“Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.�

In the Knife of Letting go everything was from Todd’s perspective, in the Ask and the Answer it was Todd and Viola, in Monsters of Men it is Todd, Viola and 1017. The complexity of the plot always growing with each new book. The perspective from the Spackle side of the war took a little time to get used to because the language of it was so different from the other perspectives. That was the genius of it though because they are foreign and it should be that different. By the end I actually loved that PoV the most because it really showed what noise could be if you had evolved with it.

Todd and Viola solidify a place in my top five YA couples. In three books there is barely any physical contact or declarations of love between them but it is undeniable the love they share for each other. The bond and connection they have it is what real love is and not the infatuations or lust of other YA novels presented to the reader as love.

“You're the thing that matters to me, Todd. Out of this whole planet, you're the only thing that matters.�

“Sizewise, she's always been just smaller than me.
But I think of her and I feel like she's as big as the world.�

The Mayor is such a complex villain, manipulative and cunning to the point you almost think maybe he can be redeemed at times. The interactions between him and Todd were filled with worry as I wasn’t sure who was affecting who more. Both Todd and the Mayor changed each other. Mistress Coyle also plays a great antagonist. She has so many redeeming qualities but at the same time she is the worst kind of person as well twisting those same qualities in others for her purposes to win.

“even when peaceful cooperation is the obvious thing, the only thing that will keep any of us alive- There are still people who won't make that choice�

The entire series ended fantastically and I went through an emotional ringer by the time it was all said and done. This is a series that doesn’t leave you right away. There are things that will probably stick with me for life and it changed a few of the ways I think about the world and war and just different cultures in general. No culture is all good or bad and sometimes it is only a few people driving the many, but that doesn’t mean they are taking them where they want to go.

Psst : You should read Snowscape like directly after this�.The last line in the story made me smile for a long time.