Thoughts on Hero by Perry Moore
This book came to my attention because Stan Lee is reported to be making it into a tv series or a movie (I forget which) and the quote said it was the first gay superhero, which I know was so not true. But anyway, it is a book about a gay superhero. A kid who's just coming into his powers and facing a whole lot of angst wrapped up in being gay, but mostly wrapped up in his parents' history as superheroes.
The writing right off the bat did not impress me. It started in the middle of a basketball game, but was riddled with backstory and flashbacks and it just was not handled well at all. Fortunately the game, and the majority of the flashbacks, ended and the writing improved from there.
The amount of typoes in the beginning really bugged me too, but fortunately they mostly disappeared at some point as well, though I still saw some here and there.
But then the writing bugged in another way. The main character is on a bus when it gets attacked by some supervillains. He (who is also narrating) says he didn't know who those supervillains were at the time, yet he keeps calling them by their names in the narration. No, no no. Yea, okay, you can do that, but you have to handle it better. Like.. 'I later learned their names were... Blah, Blah, and MegaBlah'. But I still think it's preferably to refer to people by characteristics until you learn their name in the course of the story. Such as the author did do when it came to Dark Hero, who's first known as The Man in Black. (As you wish.)
I liked the main character, and I liked the group of superheroes he got paired with. One guy's superpower is making people sick! And one superhero is an old lady. Moore's definitely broken out of some of the tropes in coming up with characters. But then at the same time, he annoys me by having some of the heroes be far too closely aligned with actual superheroes from comic books. By which I mostly mean the one character who is clearly a takeoff on Superman. Not only is he an alien, but his adopted parents live in freaking Kansas. It couldn't be Ohio or something? I wish he'd changed more details there.
There were also a couple of moments where I couldn't understand the character's motivations.. not necessarily behind their actions, but behind their emotions. Miss Scarlett flips out a couple of times and I don't quite know what prompted it. Yea, you can have all this pent-up rage or whatnot, but it'd be nice to have a trigger before it's unleashed.
So, some good stuff in here, but I do wish he'd been a little better edited. If he writes another novel after this one, I'd hope to see some improvement.
