The Kaiju Preservation Society

When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization.” Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.

What Tom doesn’t tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world. They’re the universe’s largest and most dangerous panda and they’re in trouble.

It’s not just the Kaiju Preservation Society that’s found its way to the alternate world. Others have, too–and their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.

This book was… a mess.

I really wanted to like this book, but between the complete lack of plot and the absence of any likeable characters – except one, maybe, but he died halfway through with very little fanfare – it did not make it easy for me.

The premise was very promising, at first: our protagonist, Jamie Gray, gets laid off from a terrible job, and ends up hired as a “lifter of things” by the very mysterious Kaiju Preservation Society, or KPS for short.

From there, it’s all about travel to another dimension to protect these mystical beasts, and lifting things. So much lifting things. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had received a bones based on the number of times the words “I lift things” were used in this book. I appreciate a good running joke as much as anyone else, but at some point, you have to let it go, or it’ll just end up having the same effect as this one: annoying your readers to no end every time it appears on the page.

That’s not to say this book is all bad. I appreciated the ideas, and the first half of the story was really enjoyable. Getting to know the characters a little bit, seeing this brand new world full of complex creatures… the first half didn’t really have much of a plot, but felt more like a cozy scifi story about protecting what is alien tous even if we don’t understand it.

No, my dissatisfaction comes from the second half.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. If you want to avoid the spoilers, skip the next two paragraphs.

Listen. I get that you can’t fit everything in one short novel like this, and I can even understand that the main character is purposefully written the way they are to be an easy self-insert for the reader. But would it have killed the author to give us acting little bit of an emotional reaction to Tom’s death?

The MC learns that their first friend on-base, the one that got them the job, has been murdered and his body derived by jungle creatures, and an “Oh no” moment is all we get before the death is brushed away like yesterday’s news? I’m sorry, but that’s not going to help me emphasize with Jamie’s situation, or resonate with them in any way – it just pulls me out of the story.

And speaking of things that pull me out of the story: what was the deal with Jamie’s gender? Throughout the story, we see plenty of diverse characters – even a nonbinary supporting character, which to me means that the author knew exactly what he was doing when he made sure that at no point, in the entire book, was a single pronoun used to talk about our main character, Jamie Gray.

No physical description was given either – we know that Jamie is strong enough to “lift things”, but that’s about it. It’s a creative choice, and that’s fine, but it’s one that really bothered me for the entire time I was reading this, and it really hindered my ability to appreciate the story.

The ending, for me, was a bit of a letdown. As with the plot overall, it had some good ideas, but never really seemed to hook me in, or make me appreciate the difficulty of the situation the characters were facing.

I’m still on the fence about the rating on this one. I’d honestly say a 2.5 out of 5 stars, but I think I’ll be generous and around it upto a 3.

Overall, this book had a great premise, and was an interesting cozy sci-fi read for the first half, with a mildly disappointing ending and some creative choices I didn’t quite understand.

If you’ve read it, let me know in the comments what you thought about the main character’s presentation!

Until next time,

Maude.