The worldbuilding set up in this story is fascinating. There are a lot of elements going and a lot of high stakes. This excerpt cuts off the moment before the competitors of the race are announced. I definitely want to find out what happens next.

From the moment I saw that gorgeous cover and read the blurb of Monsters Born and Made I knew I needed to read it.
And I truly wanted to love it. The premise was amazing.
I mean, a dystopian water world? A badass MC entering a deadly competition as an underdog? A race with marine monsters?
Well, what could have possibly gone wrong? Sadly, the answer is a lot.

This book fell flat for me and I found it difficult to get attached to the main character, Koral. The love interest was pretty bland and didn't build to something more.
The most intriguing aspects of the story (the Maristag race and the uprising rebellion against the caste system) were presented in such a rushed and superficial way that half the time left me confused, and wanting for more the other half.
Considering how much it was advertised, it was hard to get many South Asian vibes from this novel.

Overall, it was a quite average read that a younger YA audience may appreciate nonetheless.

I have read the first few chapters of the e-book, and then listened to the entire audiobook. Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me access to this advanced audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Great excerpt. Made me interested in the novel and learning what happened next. Very good teaser. Can't wait to read the full book.

Exciting start! Looking forward to reading the rest of the book and seeing how the stakes play out. Wish there were more visual descriptors of places and the monsters!

The start of Monsters Born and Made is intriguing, and I can’t wait to learn more about this world, the creatures, and the main characters.

I have the ebook to listen to, so I’m excited to see how the rest of the book goes.

I read the excerpt and really enjoyed this so far. I look forward to reading the rest of the book when it comes out. It reminds me of hunger games a bit.

The first six chapters of Monsters Born and Made immediately took me to a dystopian world that felt both real and other worldly. I think this book would be perfect for fans of Fable and Namesake, and any reader eager to read about a young woman desperate to break her family from the suffocating bonds of poverty. Koral and her family risk their lives to capture Maristags, an oceanic creature famed for its danger. When Koral has no other options to help her family find money for food and medicine she decides to take matters into her own hands and find a way into a deadly chariot tournament using one of the famous Maristag creatures. There is danger at every turn, and I am excited to read the rest of her adventure.

I loved this excerpt so much. I can not wait for the full novel to be released! This storyline was incredible at first glimps and i have high hopes for the rest of this novel.

I'm so glad that I picked up this extended excerpt! At first I wasn't entirely convinced MONSTERS BORN AND MADE would be the book for me, but these first six chapters have me so intrigued that I will definitely be looking forward to more of this debut!

This book has an intriguing plot. The author just drops the reader deep in without a lot of detail. The early chapters were a lot of things happening and taking a while to fully understand the details of the worldbuilding. its a bit overwhelming at times.

Other than that minor note, I'm excited for the rest of the book.

OOOH I am beyond excited to continue reading!!! The first few chapters show such excellent worldbuilding, paired with strong characters and an adventure I'm excited to see play out!

Big thanks to Sourcebooks for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The cover is what immediately drew me to this book, it is absolutely stunning. Next I read the summary and saw the comparison to The Hunger Games and was sold. Unfortunately, the first 6 chapters were sloooow. It honestly didn’t even start to pick up until more than halfway in, but the last quarter of the book was very enjoyable. I found myself devouring the chapters that described the games and dragging through the chapters in between. I was also really hoping to see more of the mysterious relationship between Koral and Dorian. The short snippets were just not enough for me. Overall, I wasn’t super attached to any of the characters besides Stormgold. This was good, but not the best, and did not have me hooked like when I read The Hunger Games.

Pairing this excerpt with the audiobook has been the best idea to read this. You can listen to the book while looking at the maps mentioned in the book here. After that, I just kept reading + listening parallelely until I ran out of the content in the excerpt!!

However short, it is enough to get you hooked. The new creatures mentioned in the story, especially the Maristags. The arena and world-building aspects of this book have definitely been top-notch. I do understand its comparison to The Hunger Games, but not so much with the Violent Delights.

So if you are a fan of new mythical creatures and unjust society - you can read it.

The style of writing is so unique, it gets wrapped up in it and it often feels like reading parts of a poem due to the description and how the sentences are perfectly structured.

A perfect dystopian world that includes harsh hot conditions, poverty, fighting for survival, and a sea with maristags.

I found Koral so utterly strong and at times I sometimes forgot she was a girl. I think she has become a new favourite female character.

I highly look forward to reading the whole book in the future.

Thank you Netgalley, Sourcebooks and Tanvah Berwah for the extract of Monsters Born and Made.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the eARC sample of this book.

I really enjoyed this sample and I will absolutely check out the full book once it is released. Koral was a really compelling character to follow. Her love for her family makes her easy to root for. It's been a while since I've read a dystopian world, but Berwah managed to make their's feel fresh and new. That being said, Monsters Born and Made does remind me of a couple of YA fantasy books, and I think it would be fantastic for fans of The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

I'm looking forward to finishing the book once it's released.

Just from this excerpt, I don't have much to say except that I wasn't feeling it. I wasn't a fan of the writing style or the sort of story this seems to be. I still have hope that this could have a good story, but for having the first chunk of the book and being unexcited wasn't a great first impression.

Thanks to Netgalley for the eARC sample of this book.

This one will be short and sweet mainly because I just had an excerpt from the book, not a full review copy. That being said, I did enjoy what I read.

Koral, the protagonist, comes from an impoverished background where their only respite is capturing and raising maristags. However, this is a dangerous task because maristags are highly unpredictable and can often be unruly, which is shown when Koral's brother is injured by one. Knowing that money is scarce, Koral decides to enter the Glory Race in order to bring income to her family and save herself from a possible arranged marriage.

Okay, right off the bat, I could see many similarities between this book and the Hunger Games, but it's well deserved. Like Katniss, Koral is placed in a race where elites bet on the winners, regardless of the stakes for the participants, and Berwah doesn't shy away from presenting the elites for the troublesome and problematic people they are.

I look forward to reading this book in its entirety and seeing what happens to Koral and how her story ends!

This review is for the excerpt, not the entire novel.
From what I've read so far, this book gives strong Scorpio Races vibes, almost too strong to be honest. The summary relies heavily on it being South Asian but there is zero indication of that, hopefully it will become more realized farther into the book.
There's a lot going on in these first few chapters and the stakes are already high. I'm eager to read the rest of the novel upon release.

I was really looking forward to reading this excerpt because I am a big fan of south asian inspired fantasy. however, after reading this excerpt I'm not sure I want to read the rest of the book. the writing style was strange and choppy, so maybe this just isn't meant for me. also, the worldbuilding was really confusing and because I spent the whole time trying to understand what was even going on, I found myself frustrated and not caring about the characters or the plot.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an excerpt to read and review!

Because I only as able to read an excerpt, I can’t say whether or not my opinion of the book would’ve changed after the first 6 chapters that I was able to read, but from what I read i don’t think I’ll be picking up the full book when it releases, unfortunately.

The first thing I really didn’t like was the writing style, it was way too choppy for me. For example, here’s a section that I highlighted: “We’re in mourning. I chew on every bit of food like it’s my last. A feeling Iremember from the year I turned eight. The squelch of my chewing is too loud. I drag my steel spoon across the table to camflauge it. Baba shoots me a sharp look. I stop. The silence resumes. It simmers.” Since this is an ARC of those first few chapters, this particular quote could change but the entire excerpt was written like this, and I just really didn’t mesh well with this writing style. I’m not sure if this will end up in the finished copy, but I also didn’t like how random words were hyphenated, like historian was hyphenated to his-torian, or consider-ably. There were also random numbers (which I think were meant to be page numbers?) that would appear sometimes in the middle of words. These formatting issues combined with the writing type made it really hard for me to enjoy the excerpt..

I wa also very confused as to what was going on and the world building was pretty vague. There is talk about the sun being deadly so people live underground and there being all these deadly monsters, but I feel like we’re just told that instead of us actually seeing it. Along with that, it seems like the author had a lot of ideas that they tried to pack into one book, such as maristags and aquabats and raptors (like he dinosaurs?) and then there is this weird ship that fell to the earth, so I don’t know if that also means there are aliens as well? And none of the creatures are described in a way that makes it sound plausible, like there are Capricorns (which are goat/fish hybrids) that we are told patrol on land, but how do they carry a rider when they only have two legs and a fin? This book really lacked a lot of descriptive elements, and I think looking at the quote I mentioned above, it’s very much a book where we’re told things rather than shown things.

I was also a bit confused because this is being pitched as a South Asian-inspired world so I was expecting more of the world building to be Asian inspired, but that wasn’t the case. The author does have a note on Goodreads, and says that for her, the South Asian aspect comes in with the caste system and how characters are marginalized and that’s how for her, this story is South Asian and I fully respect that, but the marketing for this book makes it sound like it would’ve been more than that, so my expectations going in were different. That said, I’m also confused as to why the groups are called Landers and Renters, does it have to do with real estate like I imagine, or is it just the names that were chosen? There is also a rebel group called Freedom’s Ark, or Arkers for short. Is that a biblical reference? In the chapters I read, nothing was ever really explained in a way that made sense to me.

Finally, I was also confused by the family dynamic because it seems like everyone in Koral’s family hates her for some reason. Her brother doesn’t want her to do her job capturing maristags, her father blames her for them not having money and trying to solve their problems, and her mother has been beaten down so much that she can’t bring herself to stand up for her daughter. Koral herself seemed to want to help her family, but came off as selfish at the same time. And that was maybe due to the fact that we’re told how she’s feeling instead of seeing her emotions.

This chapter sampler was also6 chapters long, and at the end of it we still hadn’t gotten to the race yet, which is the major plot point of the story and I feel like maybe it could’ve gotten there sooner.

Unfortunately, this particular book isn’t for me which is really disappointing because I was really looking forward to it, especially as it’s a debut with a stunning cover and an intriguing synopsis. That said, these are just my feelings on the excerpt so if you think the book sounds interesting definitely give it a shot, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.