The Ables (Jeremy Scott)

The Ables
Jeremy Scott
Clovercroft Publishing
Fiction, MG Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Twelve-year-old Phillip Sallinger always loved superhero comics, but never dreamed he came from a family of them - or that he himself had powers. Blind since birth, he never considered he could be a hero himself. But that was before his mom and dad moved him to the town of Freepoint, and before Dad explained that they come from a long line of "custodians," as people with powers are known. According to DNA tests at birth, both Phillip and his kid brother Patrick will be developing powers, soon, too - which is why they moved to Freepoint, a custodian town. Now that Phillip's of age and showing his telekinesis, he needs to be around others of their own kind.
Ordinarily, going to a new school just for superheroes would be the most exciting thing Phillip could think of... but, due to his blindness, he's sent to the Special Education room with other disabled custodian kids, deprived of opportunities to test his budding powers in citywide "SuperSim" games like the other students. As Phillip and his new friends chafe under restraints, determined to prove themselves the equal of any other kids, a new danger arises - a rumor about the return of a long-fallen custodian, one more powerful than any living today... one whose return would herald a new era, and one which some custodians are willing to go to extreme measures to enable.

REVIEW: The author, Jeremy Scott, runs the popular movie-mocking CinemaSins channel on YouTube (among others.) Given his familiarity with movies, and his willingness to call them out on overused cliches and stereotypes and other symptoms of flabby writing, I looked forward to seeing what he would do with his own tale. Unfortunately, The Ables soon degenerates into a series of overused cliches and stereotypes, with several stretches of padding - not to mention moments that jerk the reader around. Phillip isn't the most dynamic of protagonists, the usual "everyman" young hero-to-be, aside from his blindness. He finds friends and enemies at school, who tend to be other shallow, familiar tropes... almost all of whom are males. Despite there being a few girls in Phillip's Special Education classes (who also might've enjoyed proving themselves to other superpowered students, or just having friends), they're gone almost as soon as they're introduced. The only females with notable roles at all are the Supportive Teacher and the Concerned Mom. (As for the latter, risking a minor spoiler, I'd honestly expected better of a cinema buff like Scott than to stoop to "fridging" as character motivation.) The story runs a little long, as Phillip and his friends push against the limits of their disabilities, get pushed back, and ultimately have to face a threat that's paralyzed the grown-up population... against a villain whose "secret identity" was pretty easy to guess, between clues in the book and general story tropes. A fair bit of padding and banter, not all of it particularly interesting, fills out page count. The ending dropped things a half-star for not only drawing itself out too long but being far to predictable in how it played out. I found myself disgruntled enough to dip the rating below the bland Okay it almost merited.

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