The Isle of Blood

When I was looking this up on bookdepository, the site said it's for ages 12-15. I find it extremely dark, with a lot of disgusting elements and surprising philosophical depth for a book for that age group and I am not really sure that the people putting on the stamp were right or that they even cared about being right in the first place.
It's lovely, though. The fact that something supposedly YA can have such quality. Very often I find the genre to be watered down and many people just going “oh, well, it's okay, I mean it's YA, you shouldn't have expected it to be world class writing”, which I find fundamentally wrong. Nobody considering themselves proper, real authors should give up on their art like that and go with the easier way.
Here... Mr. Yancey went all out. Every time I read a book of this series I am impressed by the prose not being the typical, borderline offensively simple one teenager get thrown at their faces nowadays, usually cleverly blamed on the protagonist talking in first person and being not so educated. This is first person and really powerful at that. Will Henry, the protagonist has plenty of passion and emotion in what he is saying, with great descriptions and just everything to make this a very enjoyable read in my opinion.

So now Dr. Warthrop got a package sent to him by the extremely dangerous and still almost playful Dr. Kearns, with a nest woven of woman body parts, covered in a strange, gelatinous substance, delivered by a panicked man claiming to have been poisoned and needing the antidote from Warthrop. Apparently just touching the substance causes you to become... well, kind of a zombie. Now they need to trace the route of the nest, find the creature that made it and take care of everything.

Zombies are one of the creatures I am not sure about. I'm not a zombie fan, I don't hate them, I just find that they are pretty hit or miss to me. In this case it was a hit, as pretty much everything done in this series. Mr. Yancey has a talent at touching all the creatures and topics with some very unique way, not just being one of the thousands of fairly similar and indistinguishable pieces, often blamed on the canon of the creatures.
They are all nasty. All of these books will turn my stomach every time and somehow I still don't feel it's just to be nasty. I think the whole scientific atmosphere is the perfect vessel of being extremely graphic and still not feeling like the author is just trying to gross us out for the lulz. This I can handle. I guess I just have issues with theatrics and melodrama, but I can pretty much handle all the nasty things if they are presented like this.

One thing, though. One thing that feels really unnecessary and kind of lame. We have great prose, a lovely main character with a great and very complex relationship with his mentor, crazy creatures, action....
And then there is Lilly I-would-kill-you-in-your-sleep Bates! She is a spoilt, aggressive, emotional abusive little weasel. I absolute HATE Lilly. Sure, there needs to be a love interest, because blah, but she is seriously an incredibly shitty one.
This is a PSA for men; if she gets so smug and satisfied about constantly belittling you, calling you names, bossing you around, daring you to do incredibly stupid and dangerous things for fun, etc. then you should drop her, because she is a bad person. I don't care if she has cutesy hair and wears pretty frilly clothes, she is shit.
Lilly even has a mother who always needs to get her way and loves micromanaging people, because charity is kindness are about that in spoilt New York rich girl world.

I would have loved to see more monstrumologists, though. They are such a delightfully messed up group of people.
Then again, the whole series is delightfully messed up and that is the reason why I would recommend it to people who are okay with dark and disturbing reads. I find it's not popular enough, even though it is a shining example of what YA literature can achieve. But we are stuck with love triangles, magical teen girls and apocalyptic worlds that only have the nebulous “global warming or nuclear war or some shit”explanation.

Have a nice day and see with eyes, not with your hands!