Almost all of the female characters have interchangeable dialogue, especially the minor ones ( Angela, Julia, Stella, Sasha, Violet all sound exactly the same and it's infuriating given they used to be different people ) but the major one's personalities all start drifting together too. It's totally inexcusable considering how many pages it took to reach them.Ī bad plot can be saved by good characters, but there's no heroes here.Īll the major characters actually get LESS interesting in this volume as any of the personalities they started the series with have eroded away completely until they're either Good Boy(TM) or Good Girl(TM). Almost every revelation in this novel is just a massive gaping plot hole. Some questions from the first novel were answered ( identity of Chad and Vince's Dads, who arranged the kidnapping attempt, Nick's Master Plan, Alice's parents, etc ) but the answers were so much more disappointing than I could ever have imagined. I was prompted to do this because this second volume is somehow even worse than year 1.

I checked the publication date on this series to see if it was maybe a work the author did long before his NPCs series, but no, both book 1 of super powereds and book 1 of NPCs came out in the same year. I am going to go out on a limb as say that Nick Campbell deserves his own series, and despite the events at the end of this story, he is far from out of the picture. The reason I want to know more is because on every level, its characters are brilliant and very human drama unfolds from their every movement. I want to know so very much more about this world of superheroes, its history and its extent, its shadowy corporations and its elite heroes. There are some real mover and shaker beings behind the scenes, and in this, the second book of a wonderful series, we start to see their shadows looming over everything we believe to be real. Who is really cut out to be a hero? Who is learning to be a hero for the right reasons? Who is at Lander University for the wrong reasons?

That is because EVERYONE'S motivations and goals are in question.

The characters are deep and fleshed out, yet we only see a tantalizing bit of what makes each of them tick. I have been searching a long time for brilliant super hero books and I found them with Drew Hayes Super Powereds.

Super Powereds by Drew Hayes