Monday, December 31, 2012

Heroine Addiction (Jennifer Matarese)

Heroine Addiction
Jennifer Matarese
lulu.com
Fiction, Fantasy
** (Bad)


DESCRIPTION: Being a superhero's not the glamorous life it's cracked up to be. Just ask Vera Noble. Daughter of the famous Noble bloodline, her life and career were laid out before she even knew how to walk, let alone how to use her teleportation powers. But she got sick of the hypocrisy and lies, always presenting the perfect image of a loving family while, in reality, she and her parents and brother can barely spend five minutes together without coming to blows. It only got worse when Vera came out as a bisexual and her father ran off with Morris, his former arch-enemy. To save herself, she turned her back on saving the world... only to find, five years later, that it's not so easy to walk away from destiny, or family. Her father goes missing, and only his lover Morris seems to care. He goes to Vera for help, dragging her back into a life she swore she'd never return to - and a problem that her superhero skills may be too rusty to handle.

REVIEW: This sounded like a fun idea, a twist on the tropes of comic-book superheroes and their perpetually endangered worlds. Unfortunately, I found myself shunted to the side by unsympathetic characters in a universe that didn't even try to make sense, delivering problems, possibilities, and solutions out of the blue. Vera's a selfish, temperamental whiner, her family's a pack of image-obsessed phonies without an ounce of compassion between them... frankly, there were only two or three people in the whole book I gave a dang about. The story felt stretched out, with a plot that wasn't so much about Vera unraveling the mystery of her father's disappearance as it was about her arguing, defending herself to the audience, and having problems and answers fall into her lap at prolonged intervals. The climax was supposed to be emotionally dramatic, but it rang hollow after Matarese went out of her way to establish how little stock the Noble family put in genuine emotions. This eBook was also riddled with formatting errors, including misplaced paragraph breaks, perpetually dropped letters (including the inexplicable elimination of double-l's from most words), and dialog so jumbled I had trouble telling who was speaking in most conversations. None of this added up to an enjoyable reading experience.
Heroine Addiction had a few fun moments, but it felt far too long, and wallowed in too many unpleasant characters' lives.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Casting Shadows (J. Kelly Anderson) - My Review
Heroics for Beginners (John Moore) - My Review
Megamind (Single-Disc Edition) - Amazon DVD Link

No comments:

Post a Comment