Review: Super Santa

Super Santa by Kristen Pham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Well-intentioned, but not a success for me.

I saw it on Netgalley and requested it because I enjoy superhero novels, and hadn't seen one in a while. They used to be very common a few years ago, but they've fallen out of fashion; now, the kind of people who were writing them mostly seem to be writing LitRPG instead. They also used to be horribly edited, and this one (even in the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley) is not, so that's good. It does have a lot of excess commas between adjectives (including after "single" and "one," which are adjectives that should never get a comma because their order is fixed), and a couple of other glitches I'll mention to the publisher in the hope that they're corrected.

It's not right in the centre of the superhero novel genre. There are elements, but it's primarily a magical Christmas story along the lines of the movie Elf, say. In fact, it's very like a typical Christmas movie, and I was utterly unsurprised when the author's acknowledgements in the back mentioned that it started life as a screenplay. That inevitably means that large swathes of it don't make a lick of sense, but as well as the bits that didn't make sense because magical Christmas story, there were some bits that didn't make sense just in general.

For example, a reasonably important plot point depends on the fact that the author apparently doesn't know that charcoal and coal are different substances, only one of which is used to grill burgers over. A scene with the reindeer outdoors in which the protagonist, Kris, starts out not knowing the reindeer's names and then, without transition, begins using them, is suddenly and also without transition apparently inside their barn. The Christmas hyena (a commendably original and fairly funny character) is not only mentally and physically capable of sending an email from an unattended computer, which I could have just barely swallowed, but knows Kris's email address without apparently ever having been told it, and what's more has an email address of his own, in the domain of the lab where he's an experimental subject, and sends from it with no apparent setup or login.

The elephant in the room, as with any Christmas story, is that secular Christmas in real life involves exactly the corporate, capitalistic, cynical exploitation that the wholesome characters are theoretically fighting against with the power of Christmas Spirit. (Said Spirit is described in exactly the words of the Force from Star Wars, which I found amusing, as I was clearly intended to.)

The characters are deeply wholesome, except of course for the cartoonishly evil villains. Kris starts out as a sad and cynical Goth girl with not much ability at anything, but is transformed by a swift training montage into a gung-ho warrior of the Christmas Spirit. Her nonbinary best friend, whose personality mainly consists of averagely gibberish technobabble, is supportive and... supportive. Nobody has much depth, not even the main character, who has the backstory for it but ducks most of the inner conflicts, and overcomes the obstacles with relative ease. The plot twists are extremely predictable, and it takes even the very intelligent character far too long to tumble to the glaringly obvious.

Kris is a Chosen One destined by blood, which is one of my all-time least favourite tropes. In fact, when I saw "zero toxic tropes" in the blurb, I thought, "that probably depends on your definition," and I was right - destiny-by-blood is a toxic trope in my book, not only because it perpetuates a myth that's been used to oppress people for centuries (by claiming that people's position in society, up or down, is justified based on inherent qualities obtained solely through their ancestry), but also because it takes away agency, and is often used as a shortcut to avoid requiring the character put in much work to become capable. I usually avoid Chosen One books, not only because I consider it an awful trope but because I consider it badly overused and without any freshness left in it, but I didn't know this was one when I picked it up.

It's not without its strengths; it's genuinely amusing at times, and it has a good heart, though the message is well worn and taken from basically every Christmas kids' movie ever. But for me, the execution was lacking.

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