Steelheart--Brandon Sanderson
September 2013 by Delecorte
384 pages--Goodreads
There are no heroes.
Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics.
But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills.
Nobody fights the Epics... nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.
And David wants in. He wants Steelheart—the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David's father. For years, like the Reckoners, David's been studying, and planning—and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.
He's seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.
Steelheart is another book to add to Sanderson's already long list of great novels. I never thought I'd enjoy a superhero comic book in novel form so much. Some of the twists are predictable, but over all the story is still very good. Dan and I spent a long while after finishing the novel discussing how everything might work out in the next books. Steelheart is a very visual story, almost begging to be a movie. You can totally tell when during the action sequences we're supposed to switch to slow motion. And that was part of the fun of it.
The premise is intriguing: a world of super villains and a renegade bunch of humans trying to fight back. But these villains aren't as complex as Sanderson's usually are. It's too simplistic for all Epics to be inherently and completely evil from using their powers. There has to be at least one good Epic. But I trust he will develop the magic system later in the series. And hopefully he'll explain the physics-defying powers, like never ending bullets, somewhere along the way.
Character development is usually where Sanderson shines, but he had a couple of misses in this book. Cody is hilarious, David's horrible metaphors and similes are funny, and I really want to know more of Prof's back story. However, Megan is not very fleshed out. She's mostly a love interest. She has potential hidden in her history and the end plot twist, which Sanderson could explore in later books. But so far, she's kind of flat, just the hot fighter chick that the hero/audience to ogles at but who has no real personality. Hopefully, that will change.
Steelheart is an great beginning to a new series. My biggest complaint, beyond Megan, is the long wait until the sequel. And Nightweilder is SUCH a good name for a bad guy.
The Prisoner of Cell 25--Richard Paul Evans
August 2011 by Simon Pulse
326 pages--Goodreads
My name is Michael Vey, and the story I’m about to tell you is strange. Very strange. It’s my story.
To everyone at Meridian High School, Michael Vey is an ordinary fourteen-year-old. In fact, the only thing that seems to set him apart is the fact that he has Tourette’s syndrome. But Michael is anything but ordinary. Michael has special powers. Electric powers.
Michael thinks he's unique until he discovers that a cheerleader named Taylor also has special powers. With the help of Michael’s friend, Ostin, the three of them set out to discover how Michael and Taylor ended up this way, but their investigation brings them to the attention of a powerful group who wants to control the electric children – and through them the world. Michael will have to rely on his wits, powers, and friends if he’s to survive.
The Michael Vey books are super popular at my school, especially with students who don't normally read, so I figured that as a responsible teacher, I should check them out. I can see why they're popular with all my students, but they're not the books for me.
The Prisoner of Cell 25 seems to have been written specifically for some of my short attention span reluctant readers. It is quite fast paced. Boom. I have powers. Boom. I can't tell anyone. Boom. I told Taylor. Boom. She has powers too. Boom. Now people are chasing us. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. There wasn't any set up or space to breath between events. The book is made of short chapters and very, very short sentences. Come on, vary your sentence length at least a little. Don't write down to teens, Evans; they're capable of more than people give them credit for.
The villain is a bit too mustache-twirly, crazy, and evil-for-the-sake-of-being-evil for me. Yet, he can't come up with anything more evil than blackmailing airline companies? He makes stupid mistakes like running a metal pipe from Cell 25 and the cell where Taylor and the other electric powered kids are being held when he knows that electric powers can be conducted through metal. And the reason Hatch and company are scary and unbeatable is because "They have private jets and hidden compounds" (pg 156)? I had to giggle a bit at that line.
The kids are way overpowered. I'm fine with them having electric powers, even strong powers. But no police department anywhere is going to let a 14 year old interview a violent suspect because, you know, he might just get more information out of the guy that we have, despite the fact that we've been specially trained and do this as our livelihood. The final fight seemed a bit unrealistic too, though I can't speak about it in detail since I got bored and skimmed through it. Beyond being overpowered, the characters are rather unoriginal. We've got the cute, popular cheerleader; the overweight, genius friend; and the bullied kid with secret powers. They don't grow throughout the novel. And Zeus's 180 at the end is just unrealistic.
And Meridian? If you've ever driven through the West, you know for a fact that there are more obscure, tiny, out of the way places to hide out than Meridian, Idaho. And how big of a coincidence is it that two electric kids just happened to go to the same school?
The Prisoner of Cell 25 is basically brain candy. It reminds me a lot of The Maze Runner and all the reasons I didn't like that book much either. I know some of my students think Michael Vey is the best series ever, but I just don't know if I can in good conscience recommend it except to my reluctant reader when I know there are better written books out there with complex characters and logical plots.
