Super Powereds: Year 1 by Drew HayesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Literally the first book I read in Oregon...well, no, but my roomie Justin is a big, big fan, and he played the audiobook on much of the back half of our all-day drive from the Bay Area to Hood River last month. Starting in Eugene or so, and only stopping once we got to Portland and it really started to snow...but in all that time, the amount of book we were able to cover was barely a seventh of it, according to the paperback I picked up later to finally finish the story.
If only New Adult weren't such a little-used publishing age group - this book would be an absolute hit in that category if more people even knew it existed. And better than a lot of those to which it would inevitably be compared - most notably The Magicians, of which this one only has the "university for people with strange abilities" in common. But while Lev Grossman made it a point of doing a grimdark-for-grimdark's-sake parody of the fantasy novels most millennials grew up with - and the TV series only made things worse by leaning into every insufferable stereotype imaginable - Hayes populates his series with characters who pop off the page for more of the right reasons. Sure, a lot of them are flawed, and I'm not just talking about their struggles at getting their powers under proper control. They also have some variety of relatable mental and emotional struggles - and God, I wish I could be as liberated in life as some of them. Moving out I may have done, but I'm still not done growing into a real human, you know what I mean?
But they're all likable, these characters who put Lev Grossman's obnoxious asshats to shame, and a lot of them have very unique powers indeed, powers that would help them fit in pretty easily in an aged-up My Hero Academia. It helps that Hayes takes 700-plus pages to really do a lot of character deep-diving over the course of these Powered ones' freshman year at the fictional SoCal university of Lander - where, of course, the climax involves a raging wildfire. And that's all I'll say without spoilers.
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