Breakaway Books

Authored by Liselle Sambury; Published July 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

I have read and loved many YA fantasy novels, frequently questioning if their audience need be limited to young adults. While A Mastery of Monsters holds some promise, it does not quite reach those heights.

In A Mastery of Monsters, August Black is doing everything she can to stop meeting the expectations of just about everyone around her. After the disappearance of her mother, she abandons her college plans and starts scraping by in a minimum wage job. But when her brother Jules goes missing and the friendly Virgil asks her for help with a mysterious competition, August finds herself drawn back in to college life and the Learners’ Society, an organization dedicated to, yes, the mastery of monsters who live among us.

The concept behind this fantasy novel is complex, and I’ve always been more attracted to systems of magic that are easy to explain in a sentence or two. (Think: academy where teenagers are taught to ride dragons.) Halfway through this novel, I knew that there were not just minutiae but large parts of the mechanics of this world that I did not understand. At the same time, there were gaping plot holes left unaddressed that seemed comically obvious to me. In a narrative filled with monster-related disappearances, no one—including August—brings up the idea that perhaps August’s mother’s disappearance was caused by monsters (until the very end, of course)? I was incredulous that August doesn’t immediately start questioning the timing of this whole escapade and the possible connection to her mother’s absence.

But in spite of these gaps, I could definitely get behind some of the characters. Virgil is incredibly sweet and nerdy, and I love a good hero/geek. His best friend Corey has that same generosity at her core, and getting to see August build a bond with these two warmed my heart. August herself is a little more prickly—understandably so, given her family circumstances. Her absolute refusal to meet anyone’s expectations annoyed me at times and feels a little overblown, but her overall portrayal seems realistic for a teenager that’s had a rough couple of years. The bully that haunts her throughout the novel, Caden, also feels overdone and is a distinctly juvenile villain. Finally, August’s contentious relationship with her aunt Bailey seems to be almost an unnecessary add-on, but perhaps it’s planting a seed for a later novel.

If there’s a young teen in your life who likes school-age fantasy, A Mastery of Monsters could be a good rec. As an adult (who still sometimes loves YA fantasy!), I’d give it a pass.