Hero, by Perry Moore

A sweet, funny, exuberant piece of superhero comic-verse serial numbers baaaarely filed off fanfic/parody/homage.

In an America where familiar-sounding superheroes like “Warrior Woman” exist, teenage Thom is the son of a hero who was forced into retirement in disgrace. But that’s not Thom’s worst problem. It’s hard to say what his worst problem is, given that his mother’s disappeared, he’s gay and in the closet and accidentally left gay porn on his father’s laptop, he has a massive crush on a basketball player who may hate him, he’s recently developed superpowers but the only people who can train him are the heroes who destroyed his father, and his hero team is basically the mutant Bad News Bears.

Adorable, fast-paced reading which unfortunately succumbs to Act III problems. The climax loses a lot of the personal elements which made the beginning so fun, substituting slam-bang but somewhat generic action. That’s also when it becomes clear that large portions of the story are poorly or confusingly motivated, or otherwise make no sense. True, they make no sense and lack motivations in exactly the same way that superhero comics often make no sense and lack motivations. (“I will blow myself up to stop the Doomsday Device when it’s not clear that I need to/hide my identity from people who would be thrilled to know it and when I’d be better off if they knew it/kill people for no reason other than to generate plot/hide important information for no reason/set into motion an incredibly complex plot just on the off-chance that someone will be on the spot at the exact right time with the exact right item to defeat the villain’s own unnecessarily elaborate plot.”) But one hopes for fanfic and other stories based on existing texts to improve upon weak elements of the original rather than just duplicate them.

It’s quite charming nevertheless, and the rare YA novel with a gay protagonist which isn’t primarily about the difficulty of being gay in a homophobic society.

View it on Amazon: Hero

Hero, by Perry Moore

A sweet, funny, exuberant piece of superhero comic-verse serial numbers baaaarely filed off fanfic/parody/homage.

In an America where familiar-sounding superheroes like “Warrior Woman” exist, teenage Thom is the son of a hero who was forced into retirement in disgrace. But that’s not Thom’s worst problem. It’s hard to say what his worst problem is, given that his mother’s disappeared, he’s gay and in the closet and accidentally left gay porn on his father’s laptop, he has a massive crush on a basketball player who may hate him, he’s recently developed superpowers but the only people who can train him are the heroes who destroyed his father, and his hero team is basically the mutant Bad News Bears.

Adorable, fast-paced reading which unfortunately succumbs to Act III problems. The climax loses a lot of the personal elements which made the beginning so fun, substituting slam-bang but somewhat generic action. That’s also when it becomes clear that large portions of the story are poorly or confusingly motivated, or otherwise make no sense. True, they make no sense and lack motivations in exactly the same way that superhero comics often make no sense and lack motivations. (“I will blow myself up to stop the Doomsday Device when it’s not clear that I need to/hide my identity from people who would be thrilled to know it and when I’d be better off if they knew it/kill people for no reason other than to generate plot/hide important information for no reason/set into motion an incredibly complex plot just on the off-chance that someone will be on the spot at the exact right time with the exact right item to defeat the villain’s own unnecessarily elaborate plot.”) But one hopes for fanfic and other stories based on existing texts to improve upon weak elements of the original rather than just duplicate them.

It’s quite charming nevertheless, and the rare YA novel with a gay protagonist which isn’t primarily about the difficulty of being gay in a homophobic society.

View it on Amazon: Hero

Book round-up: Halpin, Sherburne, Uttley, Glyer, Rapp, Norton

Donorboy: A Novel, by Brendan Halpin. After her mothers are killed in an accident, a teenage girl ends up with the biological father she never knew. A YA novel told entirely in emails, journal entries, recorded conversations, etc, it’s clever and funny but the form eventually becomes wearisome.

The Girl Who Saw The Future, by Zoe Sherburne. A psychic girl struggles with fame when her stage mother makes her go public. Nothing brilliant, but a readable and unusual take on the psychic kid plot.

A Country Child, by Alison Uttley. A childhood memoir barely veiled in fiction by the author of many mostly-forgotten but quite good British children’s books. If you like vivid descriptions of old-timey life in rural England, and I know I do, this book is for you. There’s no plot, but who cares?

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Pavlac Glyer. An excellent analysis of the Inklings as a writing group. Recommended to anyone with any interest in the Inklings, or who has basic knowledge of them and is interested in how writing groups function.

Here Abide Monsters, by Andre Norton. This bizarre fantasy put the Bermuda Triangle, elves, aliens, time travel, and Avalon in a blender, then forgot to actually blend. People from our world blunder into another weird world where they meet others from all periods of history, and learn that elves in flying saucers are kidnapping people and making them go cold and glowy, or maybe the flyer saucer people were aliens and the elves were someone else, it was hard to tell. Roman soldiers march, nixies attack, and there might be unicorns, I forget. Disjointed and strange, and I have no idea what was going on during the climax—and by “no idea,” I mean that, for instance, I could not tell whether or not several characters died. A mildly entertaining farrago of randomness.