Book Review: ‘When We Were Monsters’ by Jennifer Niven

Jennifer Niven was a sweetheart of golden age YA in the mid 2010s with the runaway success of ‘All the Bright Places’, even with the controversy that followed. It was a book that everyone immersed in the book world had read and it was incredibly influential, but then I didn’t really notice anything from her in several years until ‘When We Were Monsters’ appeared in late 2025.

With a tagline of ‘‘The Secret History’ meets ‘One of Us is Lying’ in the most gripping thriller of the year’, we had to read it for The Dark Academicals.

Effy is one of eight students admitted to Jan Term at Brighton and Hove, an exclusive prep school with an even more exclusive course that begins each January and is taught by a respected writer. This year is Meredith Graffam, a Brighton and Hove alum who wrote about her time at the school when her best friend was murdered.

She offers the students a chance to realise their creative dreams, but only the last one standing at the end of term will win. If they can survive the ever more dangerous challenges and tests given to them by Meredith and the tests to their friendships and connections. Dark secrets emerge and even darker impulses threaten as they get closer and closer to breaking point.

Niven’s writing is effortless to read and I flew through it. The tension builds steadily and some of the revelations and secrets genuinely shocked me; it’s dark and twisty, keeping up the pace throughout without sacrificing character depth or growth.

Effy and Arlo are brilliant protagonists and the dual narration really worked here, though I do think it took something away from the dark academia elements of the novel. Their past and the betrayals that bound them were interesting so it was a shame that they were so quickly forgiven and then the instalove began swiftly. The instalove ended up putting me off and I lost interest in the tension between them fairly rapidly once they got together again.

My only other major quibble was probably a me problem, or a me from the South East of England problem: Brighton and Hove as the name of the school…

It was so jarring as someone who lives 20 miles away from the city of Brighton and Hove and visits regularly, having spent so many childhood weekends there. As I said, it’s a me problem but it felt like such a strange choice and it threw me out of the story every time the school was named on page. I’m so glad that they spent Jan Term in Moss and that name was the focus of the story rather than Brighton and Hove.

‘When We Were Monsters’ is the perfect entry into dark academia and dark academia thrillers for YA.