Review Summaries

• Readers value the measured handling of the subject and the calm narrative voice. The work is often received as one that rewards attention to inner lives and background rather than dramatic momentum.

Reviews

• Only if you're young or immortal

  I have only ever not finished 4 books in my life. This was one of them

• Interesting, but frustrating

  It's hard to put my finger on exactly why this book doesn't click. The characters and good parodies of better-known superheroes and the story is interesting, but perhaps it is the unnecessary focus on racism which slows it down. I kept getting to parts and thinking 'ok, more of this, can we just get back to the good stuff now?'. Unfortunately it has to be read, as small revelations are often dropped during these conversations. Not a waste of a read at all, and doubtless more entertaining for comic book fans like myself who can see the in-jokes, but I'm glad I only got a cheap second-hand copy. It does, however, deserve the award for best character name: Festus Piltdown III.

• An interesting 3.4 out of 5!

  A more than well told story; very interesting characters with their own psychological problems. All the characters are fleshed out and the book is a really good and interesting story, overall.

• Severely disappointed

  I love superhero stories, but this book was extremely disappointing. This book is clearly meant to be a satire, but the author has no finesse with his humor. The jokes come on thick, irrelevant, and detract/distract from the already flaccid storyline. The same is true of his main characters. The parallels to existing superheroes and superhero organizations are blatant and uninspired, and the characters come off uniformly as shallow and insipid. Their personalities are cliché, one dimensional, and propped up with accents and dialects that make merely slogging through the dialogue a feat of superhuman proportion. The writing itself is mind-numbingly contrived as well. An adverb for every verb, an adjective for every noun, slathered on in a style that invokes images of the author crouching in front of his computer, thesaurus in hand, trying to fill out a novel with fluff instead of plot. Perhaps, given that this book is supposed to be written from the perspective of Dr. Brain, this is intentional - another cliché among many. The difference is academic - I wouldn't recommend this book to ANYONE.

• Freud meets Stan Lee

  Minister Faust is dealing with a host of serious issues -- race relations, societal structures, psychotheraphy, individual responsibility vs. societal forces -- in the clever guise of a superhero novel. His satire of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man are dead on, and he broadly hints that we're not supposed to take our narrator, the analyst Dr. Brain, at her word. The character of X Man, one of the deepest and most literate I've encountered in urban fantasy, is a genuine hero, combatting his own past and the forces he perceives are against him at the same time. What we get is a multi-layered and ultimately disturbing narrative that makes political points while humanizing these superhuman beings. And Faust keeps the action coming, too. Indeed, the personal is the political, although you won't get that from Dr. Brain.

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