There's a lot of interesting things in the book that are done well--pirates, sea monsters, trainers of sea monsters--but I found myself just feeling annoyed throughout a lot of it. It starts with a very well-written but upsetting death of an animal that's intentionally horrible. But later I was just frustrated with the man character. She's been raised to raise and train sea monsters to protect ships from pirates, then she gets kidnapped by a pirate ship with an illegal monster and told to raise it.

And she seems to just keep making decisions to go right along with what the pirates want even though she makes noises about doing otherwise. Like she's got a poison pill she's supposed to take if she's captured and she doesn't. She briefly seems to be planning to do something to turn the beast against the pirates, but then she can't because she likes one of the pirates. I just didn't enjoy spending time with her at all--or any of the pirates, frankly, and wanted the sea monster to eat them all. But I started realizing that of course there wasn't going to be a satisfying apocalyptic ending because everything has to be a series and I'm supposed to want to read more about these people.