The best time to kill a superhero is before he becomes one. Scrawny seventeen-year-old Theodore Conley shocks himself and everyone else by tossing three big bullies around like they are wads of paper... This description may be from another edition of this product.
Probably alright if you consider yourself an average teenage boy obsessed with girls.
Published by Jaydon , 26 days ago
Early in the book, Theodore describes himself as an exceptionally average guy. Except for his power, he remains an exceptionally average guy throughout the book. I can't tell you what his personality is like, other than "nervous around girls." That's really it. We're told that he's smart, but he never seems to do or say anything to prove to us that he is. We're told that he's empathetic, but aside from maybe one moment in the entire book, he doesn't seem to have any more empathy than any other aggressively average guy. We're told that he's grieving, but we don't feel it. We're told that he's angry, but it never feels like we're shown the actual depth of that; it just feels like we're told that he is, so we should accept that.
A couple other characters may be more interesting than Theo himself, but none of them are so interesting that they made me want to root for them or see them on paper any more than I already have. At least one character is so aggressively obnoxious (which, to be honest, I have very little doubt is also a character that spouts a lot of Brasher's own more controversial opinions, or at least the opinions that he no doubt had when this book was published) that I almost put the book down a few times just to save my eyes from getting stuck in the back of my head.
The superhero system itself is deeply flawed, and it doesn't seem like there's going to be much of an acknowledgement of that. TO BE FAIR, this is only the first book in the series and it's entirely possible that that gets addressed later on -- but it would also be very easy for me to believe that it gets left as-is.
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