Reviewed by Julie M. Prince for TeensReadToo.com

Thom Creed is your average, everyday teenager. Except that he's prone to seizures. And he's gay. Oh, and he's the son of a superhero. An ex-superhero, actually. One who is shunned by the League as well as nearly every member of society. Oh, and Thom has superpowers of his own.

Obviously, life has never been normal, but Thom does his best to fit in. He shines on the school basketball team and does volunteer work while holding down three jobs. Until a series of events that would swallow any other kid whole sends Thom reeling into the very world he's been kept away from his entire life: the world of superheroes.

Now, while still trying to learn everything he can about his powers, the mysterious disappearance of his mother, and his own unexplored feelings, Thom is faced with new challenges. What he learns is that nothing is as it appears. Nothing and no one.

A plot- and action-driven novel, this book is ground-breaking in many ways. Not just in the obvious ways that one might think, although it is interesting to have a gay, teenage superhero as a protagonist. What kept me riveted was the look Moore offers at society. Our tendency to build people up and glory in tearing them to shreds and examining what's left. We thrive on heroes and everything they stand for, and yet, we're never content, as a people, to allow the heroes to enjoy the very things we want them to protect, like humanity, freedom, and individualism.

This book is smart. It keeps the reader engaged with a fast-paced scenes and one intriguing character after another while it conveys a message of redemption. ( )

Thank you Mr Moore, you satisfied my comic book geek inside of me and the woman I have become.

Thom is great as a main character, he is human. In that I mean that he has insecurities, at times tends to think he is the only one that has problems and I can go on but I won't. I think that the fact that Thom is so human helps to make this book as good as it is. And he is like so many teenagers and doesn't realize that no matter what your parents love you unconditionally.

I also applaud Mr Moore because the character of Dark Hero was a mystery to me until near the end and I figured it out and I think I was even late on that. So honestly I think that there is a future for you in writing mysteries if you should so decided to write them.

The character interaction is good, and watching Thom grow and in the end learn to trust other people is good. I felt so sorry for Thom and what I think was his own embarrassment at his sexuality. He was sure that his father would hate him and by the end of the book he was surprised when his Dad didn't.

His friendship with Ruth was his salvation in so many ways, she helped him to become the man he was able to be. She taught him to look a little deeper, first in her and then in Scarlett, and then everyone else.

There is so much more that I would like to write down but, I am not doing a book report and I want people to enjoy it as much as I did ( )

I'm bummed to admit it, but this book just didn't hold my attention - I read a little over a half of it and then just put it down and every time I tried to pick it up again I'd give up after a few pages. I hate when that happens! I liked the concept but the execution just didn't grab me past the initial setup. ( )

Thom Creed's father is a disgraced superhero. There's a lot Thom can't talk to his father about--like how he's developing superpowers, that the superhero League wants him to join them, and especially not that he's gay.

I read the whole book in one day. 428 pages, only breaking for food and the water closet. It was just that good. It's *sob* *pause* *gasp* over and over the whole way.

Thom is a totally relatable character that I loved to cheer on, especially speaking as a teenager. He makes mistakes, and he doesn't always have a very realistic image of himself, but he never gives up. He goes after what he wants, and he doesn't mind working for it. The other characters mostly made me want to tackle them and hug them to death, but even the characters I didn't like were fascinating. Most of the established heroes are thinly veiled versions of DC heroes--Uberman, Warrior Woman-- but they became archetypes to work from and ideas to explore, rather than the parodies I was worried about.

The plot was intricate, 428 pages is long for a YA novel, but it was easy to follow, one event flowing naturally into the next. Perry Moore slammed right to the heart of what superheroes mean, both the fantastic and the terrible but mostly the amazing.

I highly recommend this book to anyone. YA, otherwise, superhero fan, otherwise, GLBT, otherwise, whatever. I hear there's a TV series in the works and I can't wait... I'm sure I'll be mentioning this book in other reviews, but as yet I don't have anything I can recommend that wouldn't fall flat after reading this. Maybe go read the classic graphic novels. ( )

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/492223.html

"I'm a little mixed about this book. I think it definitely hit all the bases it meant to hit - it's a solid novel about a gay teen superhero, just like the cover jacket says. You can't say the book failed at addressing any of these points, because it did, as well as you expect a YA novel to hit them. [...] And I enjoyed the story a lot, and not just the superhero part. I think this might be the first book I've read that really addresses teenage/young adult homosexuality (not that I haven't read books with gay characters, or even gay teenage characters, but they're really just kinda there). So it got me to thinking, which I'm sure was part of Mr. Moore's intention.

What gets me about the book was that it didn't really go any deeper. It hit the bases it had to, along with a few other things (Thom's father is a disgraced hero, and his mother disappeared years ago), but there was a lot of context beyond that. I don't know much about the world he lives in - there are superheroes who are thinly veiled analogues of DC heroes, but at the same time Thom is aware of the Legion of Super-Heroes as a comic. There's a team of superheroes called the League, but we don't really know much about the organization, not even public information, which is as much as Thom would definitely know. But it goes beyond that - the other characters have histories/problems which are brought up but solved (for now, anyway) with a minimum of fuss." ( )