If you are into cryptids/imaginary beasts/monsters from mythology and folklore, then you’ll find Once There Was to be a real treat. In this story, a teenager named Marjan is left an orphan when her father, a veterinarian, is murdered. Marjan soon discovers that her father had an unusual clientele consisting of magical animals and that she has inherited a gift of sensing their feelings and needs, a discovery that upends her life in every possible way.

The book explores grief, magic, and found family as well as Marjan’s experience as the American-born daughter of Iranian-American immigrants. There’s a romance, although it’s not the central aspect of the book, and there are struggles around making new friends and keeping old ones. I enjoyed all of these parts of the book, especially the way the friendships coalesce at the end of the story.

Of course, what I’m really here for are the fur babies and they are glorious. With one exception, author Kiyash Monsef avoids making these creatures cute, instead describing their power, their emotions, and the incredibleness of their bodies. The descriptions of the animals alone makes the book worth reading. There are various people and groups with various ideas of what should happen with these animals, and Marjan finds herself in constant ethical tangles, especially since no group is entirely right and, until the very end of the book, no group is entirely wrong. Mostly wrong – but not all wrong. So these debates have real weight and real consequences, and a large part of the story involves Marjan figuring out how to approach them.

One overarching aspect frustrated me: at no point did I believe that a 15-year old would act, talk, or keep house in the way that Marjan does, nor did I believe that adults would interact with her in the way that they do. Plausibility wise, the narrative would make more sense if Marjan was in her early 20s on both a plot level and in terms of how Marjan behaves and how all of the other characters behave to her. I liked Marjan tremendously. I just didn’t believe that she is a fifteen-year-old, and I’d give a lot to see the legal paperwork in her life as a business-owning minor who lives alone. A bigger problem than Marjan acting too old was that adults who had never met her before instantly treated her as though she was in her twenties and not her mid-teens.

I acknowledge that there are some mitigating factors here. It’s not unusual for the children of immigrants to have to mature early, nor is it unusual for only children, nor for children who, as Marjan has, lost a mother, to shoulder many responsibilities usually managed by adults. Her father started leaving her at home for weeks on end beginning when she was ten, and she knew that she would have to follow intense rules about secrecy and perfection in order to avoid the notice of Child Protection Services.

Additionally, this is a YA novel, which means that its core target demographic is teens, not mothers of teens. While this certainly isn’t true for all readers or for all YA books, there are many YA books in which teenagers act much older than their written ages in a variety of ways. I think that for many teens the unusually high maturity level of the protagonist in some books, and the adult situations in which they find themselves, is part of the wish fulfillment aspect of the story. Those readers will have no complaints.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book greatly. While the ending wraps up the plot, there is room for a sequel and I’d dearly love to read it. I long to know how the cryptids are doing after the ending. I’m not worried about the ever resourceful Marjan, however. She will be fine, and I look forward to her further adventures.

– Carrie S

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them meets Neil Gaiman in this “striking and heartfelt” (Kirkus Reviews) novel about an Iranian American girl who discovers that her father was secretly a veterinarian to magical creatures—and that she must take up his mantle, despite the many dangers.

Once was, once wasn’t.

So began the stories Marjan’s father told her as a little girl—fables like the story of the girl who sprung a unicorn from a hunter’s snare, or the nomad boy who rescued a baby shirdal. Tales of mythical beasts that filled her with curiosity and wonder.

But Marjan’s not a little girl anymore. In the wake of her father’s sudden death, she is trying to hold it all together: her schoolwork, friendships, and keeping her dad’s shoestring veterinary practice from going under. Then, one day, she receives a visitor who reveals something stunning: Marjan’s father was no ordinary veterinarian. The creatures out of the stories he told her were real—and he traveled the world to care for them. And now that he’s gone, she must take his place.

Marjan steps into a secret world hidden in plain sight, where magical creatures are bought and sold, treasured and trapped. She finds friends she never knew she needed—a charming British boy who grew up with a griffon, a runaway witch seeking magic and home—while trying to hide her double life from her old friends and classmates.

The deeper Marjan gets into treating these animals, the closer she comes to finding who killed her father—and to a shocking truth that will reawaken her sense of wonder and put humans and beasts in the gravest of danger.

Middle Grade, Science Fiction/Fantasy