Review: The Hollow Boys

The Hollow Boys by Douglas Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Supers novels are often badly written, but this one is not. It's well edited, even in the pre-release version I got for review via Netgalley, with engaging characters, good pacing and a twisty plot.

Sure, the villains are a touch cartoonish, and there are a few well-worn tropes - the loss of the mentor, the villain's mistreated minion having a heel-face turn, and the like. One of the protagonists has what I call a "superhero job," supposedly important but in practice able to be set aside (or even made use of, in an unrealistically compressed timeframe) in order to tend to the plot. But the strengths well outweighed these minor weaknesses for me.

There are two protagonists, both of whom get to be effective in resolving the plot. Case, a street kid with a mysterious but helpful Voice in her head, who fiercely protects her little brother with the help of his ability to fade from people's notice, is just as capable as Will, the billionaire teenage heir who has added to his missing parents' fortune with the popular graphic novel he writes. Said graphic novel features a fictionalized version of his own superhero persona, the Dream Rider; he's able to astral project into the realm of Dream, and find out, for example, where kidnapped children are in order to alert the police.

When a body-stealing sorcerer, a Manx witch, and an old Tibetan monk turn up in their lives and unwittingly bring them together, Case and Will team up, hook up, and act with courage, intelligence and resourcefulness, risking everything for the sake of others. This is just what I look for in protagonists, and along with the capable writing makes this a very successful book as far as I'm concerned. It easily makes the Gold tier of my Best of the Year list.

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