Book One of The Monsters Club Series by Lotte Jean Elliott
Junie Han has it all: born in a wealthy family that can afford the best private education, she is beautiful, smart, polite and funny; she is part of the right clique at school, has great grades and a bright future ahead.
That’s not all, however: Junie also has a secret alter ego, the Queen of Coding, a dangerous, dark web hacker making a lot of money through high-stakes, illegal hacking jobs. This online persona is the real Junie: callous, reckless, scheming.
She’s made this choice for a number of reasons: she feels that the world she inhabits is not for her, she finds her friends superficial and mean, she has no interest whatsoever in fulfilling her parents’ dream to go to Oxford just because they went there before her. To free herself from all this, every single penny she makes from her hacking activity goes into a private account, that she will use to provide for herself once in Tokyo. She’s planning on moving to the other side of the planet because her only true friend lives there, a guy named Yamazaki, a brilliant hacker she’s worked with many times, completing jobs and splitting rewards. They met through a hacker community that serves as meeting point for hackers around the world. A scoreboard ranks community members based on how many hacking jobs they’ve completed successfully, each job corresponding to a certain amount of points. Junie and Yamazaki are battling for first place in the chart, but their rivalry will take them to hack a very dangerous website, The Monsters Club, a forum where serial killers gloat over their latest killing and share the most sordid details. The creator of the website doesn’t react well to Junie’s interferences, to the point that what was limited to the online world quickly moves to the real-life space, with real consequences. As she gets closer and closer to danger, with her double life harder and harder to conceal, will Junie be able to stay safe? Or will someone she loves become the next victim posted on the Monsters Club’s website?
In this imaginative, ‘out of the box’ book, Elliott offers us an outstandingly conceived female main character – we like to think of it as a “Serena van der Woodsen (Gossip Girl) meets Lisbeth Salander (The Millenium Trilogy)” scenario. We (finally!) see a woman thriving in a world that is still male-dominated, where computer-loving girls with exceptional coding skills are looked at like unicorns; the dark world Junie inhabits is smartly intertwined with the girly-girl, wealthy teenage environment we have seen in mainstream tv-shows such as Elite, Young Royals or Riverdale. All of this with a thriller, high-adrenaline twist. The fact that the narrative is interspersed with screenshots of text messages and online chats makes the whole book more realistic and definitely engaging, and the series of events quickly leading to Junie’s complete destruction is imaginative, gripping and page-turning. We guarantee that once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop until the last, surprising plot-twist, that will leave you astonished and on the verge of tears – happy tears, though.
Better still, Chapter Two of the series is already out (review coming soon)!
The ‘Monsters Club’ Series is available for purchase at: https://bit.ly/3X78Hga
