Book #24 of 2018: The Supervillain and Me

The Supervillain and Me by Danielle Banas
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



The Supervillain and Me should have completely not worked for me:

It started its life on Wattpad. I've never had a good experience with a single thing I read there.
It's romance. (There's a secondary plot as well, but the romance was the big thing.)
It's YA romance. Teenage romance...

But even with those three things, I loved this book. The characters were realistic, believable (and yet not annoying) teenagers. The romance part of the book was just as good as the characters.

Unfortunately the secondary plot, the non-romance storyline, worked a lot less well for me.

Set in a world just like ours, for some reason people very very rarely develop superpowers in their teenage years. Superheros are so rare, most major city has only one. Morriston, the city this story takes place in, happens to have two, but one is a "B list" hero (Fish Boy) whose superpower is to take on the characteristic of fish, so most people don't count him.

Red Comet is the city's main superhero and also the main character's brother. So we got interesting story about how the MC (Abby) felt that her brother was so much more important than her.

The main plot was Abby's slow friendship and then relationship with Iron Phantom, Morriston's super villain. Even though he's not really a villain at all, the media just painted him as one, I really liked him a lot.

The secondary plot was an issue for me. Unfortunately I didn't believe it at all, so that colored the entire second half of the book for me. Morriston has a ton of crime, more than any other major city, so the mayor (Abby's father) decides to do something. He decides to put a microchip into every person in the city, one that supposedly monitors emotions. If anyone even thinks of breaking the law, it sends a signal to the government and they can call the superheroes in. No one had an issue with that happening. The whole city just lined up to get one. The mayor said something like "anyone who doesn't want that can just move out of the city", but that's just not how the world works, and this was set in the real world (with the addition of superheroes).

Another small warning: This book really wasn't about superheroes/supervillains. They were, at the very best, window dressing on the romance/relationship plot.

Even with these flaws, The Supervillain and Me was a fun, light, fast read. If this author writes another book, I'd happily give it a try.

Currently reading: The Baboon King. I'm too early in it to have an opinion on it yet, but the writing seems quite good.