Book Review: Wearing The Cape

I've been on a Super-hero novel kick lately (Not graphic novel -- real book with words and paragraphs and everything!) and found this via amazon's "Readers who bought this also bought..." recommendation I believe. So, I bought Wearing The Cape by Marion G. Harmon and wasn't disappointed.

I'm not sure who the target audience is on this. Fortunately for me I was in the mood for flying capes busting up baddies and chucking cars and saving the day so that scooted me into the target audience camp regardless of what demographic it was aimed at. It didn't feel like it was aimed at a female audience (The protagonist was female.) but it didn't seem aimed at... you know. I don't know if there WAS or HAS to be a target demographic split on gender lines on this type of book. I wanted super-hero novel and it's what I got.

There's no real attempt at explaining the why of hero powers, they just happen, and I'm totally OK with that because it explains it as a whole bunch of people had it "just happen" to them at the same time and these "breakthroughs" became either heroes or villains... I liked the characters but while the main ones were well fleshed out the secondaries seemed almost too two dimensional sometimes. I know every character can't be filled out, especially in a cast as big as this one but I didn't really KNOW any of them except the leads.

The story was well done and one of the commenters commented about the pacing of the book. I don't know if it was pacing or characters, but there were times, toward the middle, where it was easy to put down and read something else (especially dangerous to us Kindle folk who have something else ready-to-hand lol) for a while. I didn't do it because I didn't like Wearing The Cape so much as because my interest in something else that I wasn't reading would rise higher than what I was actually reading... that being said I never stayed away for long.

The last quarter of the book I read at work and I tore through it. It was excellently written. The pacing was good. The story was good. The edge of the seat feeling was good. I'm not going to say what else was good but it was good. Go read it. You'll agree.

Some hay has been made about the age disparity between Atlas an Astra, but it didn't bug me. If it'd been tawdry or a little blue then I'd have had a problem with it, but these are super-heroes. They're noble. They don't do blue. I thought it was well handled and it didn't bug me.

If you're in the mood for super-hero fiction I recommend this one. I think it's a first novel and if I can come out with one as good as this I'll be well pleased.