Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I do love a good superhero novel. I follow the blog Superhero Novels so I can find books like this, and that is where I found it.
What I, personally, mean when I say "good superhero novel" is: well-written, character-driven, plays intelligently with the tropes, succeeds in balancing the crazy absurdities of superheroism with how things work in the real world while making both believable, makes implicit assumptions of the genre explicit and questions them, and doesn't go too dark while doing so. Velveteen ticks every one of those boxes with a big thick pen.
I especially loved the fact that the true evil villains were not the wild-eyed death-ray guys but the Marketing Division of the Super Patriots superhero franchise.
The sequel is due out this month, and I will be on it like spandex.
The one thing that could have been improved slightly was the editing. It's small-press, and not badly done (I suspect Seanan McGuire writes a pretty clean manuscript to start with), but near the beginning there are a lot of compound words that have an excess space in the middle, including a few instances of a superhero name ("Supermodel" written as "Super model"). Also, I noticed at least two instances of "discrete" used to mean "discreet".
Otherwise, my only disappointments were that I wanted it to be longer, and I wanted the sequels immediately. Good stuff.
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