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Jun. 26th, 2012 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupYay! More book reviews!
Last week, as part of my haul from lulu.com, I received and read Heroine Addiction by Jennifer Matarese. [print][e-book] What a fun, entertaining read.
My favorite part of the book, hands-down, was the world building. Matarese created a world where superheroes are not only prevalent but they have been for centuries, where institutions have risen up to handle both superheroes and supervillains, and where society is permeated with both to its very core. She clearly put a lot of thought into the world she was creating and her attention to detail was key to bringing the story itself to vivid life. Her world is just plain neat and it hearkens back, in a good way, to the Golden Age of comics. I would love to see more stories set in that world.
My other favorite part (what, I can favorite more than one part!) is the characters. They're all richly conceived and fully formed. It's clear from their treatment that they all have their own stories to tell and that Matarese has an idea about what those stories might be. I particularly appreciated how she used clothing to add detail to character, she clearly understands how people use fasion to express and define their personalities and how important a superhero's costume would be as both a personal statement and a marketing tool.
Weirdly, one of my few complaints is that Matarese's ability to make us love and appreciate her characters occasionally caused this reader to lose the thread of the actual story she was telling. The central mystery got a little lost under all of the characters so when the culminating moment rolled around it felt a little underwhelming. Which is a bizarre reaction, on my end, given the high cost of the heroes' victory.
Though, huh, now that I think about it, the characters who we really got to know and love weren't even present at the final confrontation. The story was about Vera's family but we spent very little actual story time with them and, given that it was told in First Person Singular, our perspective on them was colored by Vera's complicated relationship with them.
[Tangentially, this is similar to how I felt about the culmination of Mary Borsellino's Wolf House series, a series that, otherwise, I loved whole-heartedly. The plot-character balance is clearly a difficult one to maintain.]
That being said, it is literally the one quibble I have about the book. The book is well-crafted, well-imagined, and well-executed. I wish more superhero stories, and comic books, were as finely presented as this one was.
Heroine Addiction is rollicking good time of a book. I would love to see more from this universe or, at the very least, more from Jennifer Matarese. If you like snappy dialogue, imaginative settings, and awesome superhero action, then I bet you'll really dig this book.
comments at http://liptonrm.dreamwidth.org/44774.html.
Last week, as part of my haul from lulu.com, I received and read Heroine Addiction by Jennifer Matarese. [print][e-book] What a fun, entertaining read.
My favorite part of the book, hands-down, was the world building. Matarese created a world where superheroes are not only prevalent but they have been for centuries, where institutions have risen up to handle both superheroes and supervillains, and where society is permeated with both to its very core. She clearly put a lot of thought into the world she was creating and her attention to detail was key to bringing the story itself to vivid life. Her world is just plain neat and it hearkens back, in a good way, to the Golden Age of comics. I would love to see more stories set in that world.
My other favorite part (what, I can favorite more than one part!) is the characters. They're all richly conceived and fully formed. It's clear from their treatment that they all have their own stories to tell and that Matarese has an idea about what those stories might be. I particularly appreciated how she used clothing to add detail to character, she clearly understands how people use fasion to express and define their personalities and how important a superhero's costume would be as both a personal statement and a marketing tool.
Weirdly, one of my few complaints is that Matarese's ability to make us love and appreciate her characters occasionally caused this reader to lose the thread of the actual story she was telling. The central mystery got a little lost under all of the characters so when the culminating moment rolled around it felt a little underwhelming. Which is a bizarre reaction, on my end, given the high cost of the heroes' victory.
Though, huh, now that I think about it, the characters who we really got to know and love weren't even present at the final confrontation. The story was about Vera's family but we spent very little actual story time with them and, given that it was told in First Person Singular, our perspective on them was colored by Vera's complicated relationship with them.
[Tangentially, this is similar to how I felt about the culmination of Mary Borsellino's Wolf House series, a series that, otherwise, I loved whole-heartedly. The plot-character balance is clearly a difficult one to maintain.]
That being said, it is literally the one quibble I have about the book. The book is well-crafted, well-imagined, and well-executed. I wish more superhero stories, and comic books, were as finely presented as this one was.
Heroine Addiction is rollicking good time of a book. I would love to see more from this universe or, at the very least, more from Jennifer Matarese. If you like snappy dialogue, imaginative settings, and awesome superhero action, then I bet you'll really dig this book.
