RUBICONS - Brett Riley

The "Freaks" of Quapaw City, Arkansas are high school juniors now and maybe being adults is scarier than facing monsters from other dimensions. ... Nope, the monsters are still scarier. But other adults  ... such as the clandestine government group known as "The Team" ... are, if not scary, a definite threat to the teens trying to save their families, their friends, their town, and the world (in pretty much that order).

The Team knows that there's something strange - extradimensional? supernatural? - going on, and they a pretty sure the Freaks are involved, but they don't quite trust the Freaks and the Freaks don't trust the team, even though they may be on the same side. But with the newest monster entering their dimension being a dragon, it's going to take all their skills, resources, and trust in one another to be successful in battle.

I've been a bit underwhelmed by "The Freaks" books but I thought that there were some nice touches here. The fight with the dragon is well done. It was exciting and dangerous and it definitely had me turning pages to see what would happen next. It was quite thrilling.

But the 'monster' was such a small part of this book.  Mostly this was about relationships, and, being a book of the 2020's era, LGBTQ+ relationships are all the rage and author Brett Riley plays right in to the hot topic.

I think, however, that the book tries to do too much. The relationships take up the majority of the novel. This makes a lot of sense ... high school juniors, really starting to become young adults and now facing things, like adults, for the first time. This is very appropriate for a YA novel.

The dragon is a terrific conflict to intersperse with the relationship drama. It's high energy and demands their focus, which of course is hard to do.

But what's up with The Team?  Do we really need this side story?  It sort of made sense in the first two books, but it feels completely out of place here. This is a complication that detracts from the other two stories and just slows the reading down.  At this point it would be hard to just remove them completely, but they didn't add anything to the story.

Looking for a good book? Rubicons by Brett Riley is a YA dark fantasy, the third book in a series, that spends more time with earth-bound, human relationship concerns than it does the extra-dimensional threats.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

3-1/2 stars

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Rubicons

author: Brett Riley

series: Freaks #3

publisher: Imbrifex Books

ISBN: 9781945501944

hardcover, 318 pages