Andromeda Snow, Superhero by Jamie LackeyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sadly, with a few notable exceptions, supers books are not that great. This one was better than average for the genre, but that's a low bar to clear.
Part of the trouble, I think, was that it's a novella, and really needed to be a novel so that the plot could be less linear and the characters more developed. It features a team of six supers, but only three of them get any depth at all.
The protagonist, a woman who has just woken up from a two-year coma to discover that she's quadriplegic but also telekinetic (so she can move her body, she just can't feel anything), has a backstory, but it's pretty generic, and I didn't feel like I really got to know what her past life was like. She deals remarkably well with the considerable emotional challenges she's presented with, which is good. She's completely incurious about what happened while she was in the coma that resulted in people suddenly gaining superpowers, and we never find out, which means the author doesn't have to come up with an explanation.
Her love interest, the team leader, a former sports star and movie actor, has some unexpected aspects to him that change how we see him in the course of the book. That's also good, but I did feel like he still needed more development to take him all the way into three dimensions.
The third team member who spends significant time onscreen has a minimal backstory, and is mainly there to be someone for the protagonist to talk to.
And then there's the villain, who has a cliched motivation and a plan taken straight out of the movie Zootopia.
I had a review copy of this book from Netgalley, so I won't comment on the copy editing except to say that it needs someone with a keen eye to spot missed-out words in sentences and a couple of homonym errors - hopefully that will happen before publication.
Overall, it had some potential, but that potential needed quite a bit more work in order to be realized.
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