Review: Not Your Sidekick

Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've seen some hype for this book floating around, being a very diverse YA superhero story, so on that knowledge alone, I picked this one up after finally spotting it in the wild at my library. Inside, though the book was a little dragged down by a slow pace in its early pages, I was still very pleasantly surprised by a lot of what I found inside. Not the diversity so much - I went in knowing there'd be some good PoC and LGBT+ rep, and there was even some looks at the dark side of the latter, with Jess expressing how uncomfortable she was, as a bi girl, around the gay-male-dominated Rainbow Allies club - but more the fact that, while I thought this would have a modern setting, it was instead futuristic and post-apocalyptic, sometime in the 22nd century, over 100 years after "the Disasters" devastated the world and awakened superpowers in a certain percentage of the population. That, plus the fact that the distinction between Heroes and Villains in this future world is pretty much all manufactured for PR purposes, and there's a hell of a lot of overlap between the two, actually. Though futuristic in setting, Not Your Sidekick feels very damn relevant in today's marketing-saturated world, like all good sci-fi material. My next challenge, and I choose to accept it: ensure that my library carries Not Your Villain, to which I'm especially looking forward because I'm thinking Bells will be the star of that show. And also Seven Tears, the synopsis of which (from the back of this book) I relate to all too much.

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