Superhero book rec!
Oct. 16th, 2012 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaI love superheroes. Just, so much. Even with everything that's done badly in the genre, I love them, they make me happy, and when they're done right--
--well, nothing makes a crappy day better than new superheroes. But I've been broken up with DC since the reboot (I am NEVER getting over what they did to Oracle), and the new Batman movie was awful, and let's not even TALK about original superhero novels. They're always bad. Mediocre and uninspired and lacking in scope at best.
. . . except.
The first exception I ever found to this (IMO!) was the book Black and White, which was a really interesting take and even better, had two women superheroes as the main characters! Loved it. And today I just picked up the second exception, called Sidekicks, by Jack Ferraiolo.
Sidekicks is the story of a kid who's starting to outgrow his 60s-Robinesque childhood and his 60s-Batmanesque mentor, but his world is an entirely different place than he thought it was--and it's about to come crashing down around him. Good thing he's got some help, right? Just one problem: She's his arch-nemisis.
I LOVED this book. It made me laugh every other page, the characters were interesting and fully realized, there's two really fantastic plot twists, there's a few good easter eggs for those of us who know WAY TOO MUCH about superheroes (Every time his mentor called him "Good soldier" I got creeped out, and then it turned out to be kinda meta forshadowing! YAY). Basically, I love this and would recommend it to anyone who might be even a little bit interested in a superhero story over the age of 10.
My only two issues with the book (mind you, I'm in just-finished-it bliss land, I'm sure I'll have more to say after I've read it again) are that the plot happens bewilderingly suddenly and quickly. The book is 300 pages long, and the strictly-plot plot happens in the last 80 pages. There's a good character buildup and some forshadowing, but the book needed another 100 pages or so to get the main character into the situation. It's one of those writing things--it could easily happen this way in real life, but limited to the MC's viewpoint as we were (with two brief excursions), I needed a little bit more runway before takeoff.
The other thing is more of a "Hmm, I wonder why?" than an issue, but it was bugging me, so. The characters and the plot of Sidekicks are easily sophisticated enough to be a YA book--and in fact, the longer I read it, the more it felt like YA to me. YA with a sense of humor, but YA--right down to the actually-awesome romantic subplot and several aspects of the plot as it hit warp speed. It's never outright stated how old they are, but between their school and a little bit of math, I figure they're 13. 13's a hard age for a character--it's right on that line between middlegrade and YA. My guess is that Sidekicks is middlegrade because the author's previous book is middlegrade, and it's not a bad middlegrade! As it is, the book is MG, and I would definitely give it to a 10 year old. 8, maybe not. 10, yes. While I greatly enjoyed the book as it was, I had a quite a few moments where I was like, if you'd aged them up one year and put in that extra hundred pages, this would've made a kickass YA, and I would've loved it even more.
BUT. Those are really nitpicky things. This book is awesome, and fun, and I want to squee about it. I just--it was so obviously written by One Of Us. Someone who knows comics enough to know all the hero dynamics, and what to laugh at, and just how hard heroes work, and to have characters with emotions and thoughts about those things without getting broody or taking it too seriously--or even when things are really bad, and things get really bad for superheroes, to laugh about it anyway. The fight scenes are great and really showcase that yeah, his name is Bright Boy, but he's been training since he was six and he knows the city inside out and he's really, really not afraid of anything. Love that kind of self-confidence, without it tipping over into arrogance. Especially since he doesn't count on his superpowers--he's superstrong (which is somehow also slightly invulnerable, in this 'verse) and superfast (not Flash or even Jesse Quick levels, but faster than norm) but the important thing is that he's well-trained and experienced.
Love. It.
Sidekicks, by Jack Ferraiolo. Check it out.
--well, nothing makes a crappy day better than new superheroes. But I've been broken up with DC since the reboot (I am NEVER getting over what they did to Oracle), and the new Batman movie was awful, and let's not even TALK about original superhero novels. They're always bad. Mediocre and uninspired and lacking in scope at best.
. . . except.
The first exception I ever found to this (IMO!) was the book Black and White, which was a really interesting take and even better, had two women superheroes as the main characters! Loved it. And today I just picked up the second exception, called Sidekicks, by Jack Ferraiolo.
Sidekicks is the story of a kid who's starting to outgrow his 60s-Robinesque childhood and his 60s-Batmanesque mentor, but his world is an entirely different place than he thought it was--and it's about to come crashing down around him. Good thing he's got some help, right? Just one problem: She's his arch-nemisis.
I LOVED this book. It made me laugh every other page, the characters were interesting and fully realized, there's two really fantastic plot twists, there's a few good easter eggs for those of us who know WAY TOO MUCH about superheroes (Every time his mentor called him "Good soldier" I got creeped out, and then it turned out to be kinda meta forshadowing! YAY). Basically, I love this and would recommend it to anyone who might be even a little bit interested in a superhero story over the age of 10.
My only two issues with the book (mind you, I'm in just-finished-it bliss land, I'm sure I'll have more to say after I've read it again) are that the plot happens bewilderingly suddenly and quickly. The book is 300 pages long, and the strictly-plot plot happens in the last 80 pages. There's a good character buildup and some forshadowing, but the book needed another 100 pages or so to get the main character into the situation. It's one of those writing things--it could easily happen this way in real life, but limited to the MC's viewpoint as we were (with two brief excursions), I needed a little bit more runway before takeoff.
The other thing is more of a "Hmm, I wonder why?" than an issue, but it was bugging me, so. The characters and the plot of Sidekicks are easily sophisticated enough to be a YA book--and in fact, the longer I read it, the more it felt like YA to me. YA with a sense of humor, but YA--right down to the actually-awesome romantic subplot and several aspects of the plot as it hit warp speed. It's never outright stated how old they are, but between their school and a little bit of math, I figure they're 13. 13's a hard age for a character--it's right on that line between middlegrade and YA. My guess is that Sidekicks is middlegrade because the author's previous book is middlegrade, and it's not a bad middlegrade! As it is, the book is MG, and I would definitely give it to a 10 year old. 8, maybe not. 10, yes. While I greatly enjoyed the book as it was, I had a quite a few moments where I was like, if you'd aged them up one year and put in that extra hundred pages, this would've made a kickass YA, and I would've loved it even more.
BUT. Those are really nitpicky things. This book is awesome, and fun, and I want to squee about it. I just--it was so obviously written by One Of Us. Someone who knows comics enough to know all the hero dynamics, and what to laugh at, and just how hard heroes work, and to have characters with emotions and thoughts about those things without getting broody or taking it too seriously--or even when things are really bad, and things get really bad for superheroes, to laugh about it anyway. The fight scenes are great and really showcase that yeah, his name is Bright Boy, but he's been training since he was six and he knows the city inside out and he's really, really not afraid of anything. Love that kind of self-confidence, without it tipping over into arrogance. Especially since he doesn't count on his superpowers--he's superstrong (which is somehow also slightly invulnerable, in this 'verse) and superfast (not Flash or even Jesse Quick levels, but faster than norm) but the important thing is that he's well-trained and experienced.
Love. It.
Sidekicks, by Jack Ferraiolo. Check it out.