We’re sorry, but this post is in another castle.

This post now lives on subverting the text.

We’re sorry, this post is in another castle.

We’re sorry, this post is in another castle.

I love this book.

I love this book so much, that one part of this review will hurt to write. I’m at the same time thrilled with it and also horrified and disappointed.

There’s a little background that people who don’t care about analyzing their literature can skip. The author, Perry Moore, had a problem with how gay characters were portrayed in comic books. He had a good reason to feel this way, which can be read about in Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero, Anyway?. I don’t read comics, so all of this is out of context of the source material, but compiled together is pretty startling. So it’s safe to say that Perry Moore was on a mission: he wanted to write a book with a teenage protagonist that could be looked up to by teen readers, a realistic handling of what it meant to be a gay superhero. Mostly, I think he succeeds.

Hero is about Thom, and how Thom comes to grips with his superpowers and his sexuality. Thom is wonderful; he’s a kid, having to face tough choices, secrets he has to handle alone, and like a lot of kids, forced to deal with his own issues as well as the issues his parents leave behind. In a lot of places it reads like a first novel, the pacing sometimes reminds me of the feeling you get when stepping off a particularly rickety carnival ride and the editing could have used a sharper eye especially in the parts where Thom is listing off superhero aliases like they’re B.F.F. but then states he doesn’t know them, but overall I thought it was an good debut. I do think people who like comics should give it a chance and people who don’t like comics to also give it a chance and then come discuss it with me (what? I never said I wasn’t greedy). Read the rest of this entry »