This is the kind of book I wish I had had as a young teen. The queer representation is fantastic and the story is compelling — I’m confident this will fly off the shelves with superhuman zeal after publication day.
TJ Klune’s writing hovers between earnest and amusingly absurd, rather just like our dramatic and painfully honest hero, Nick Bell. Klune deftly steers the reader from emotion to emotion, taking us along for the ride on Nick‘s (sometimes extra) highs and lows. Reading this, I was amazed that I could go from laughing aloud to near tears, sometimes within the same chapter, caught up as I was in Nick’s story and his emotions. In Extraordinaries, Klune gives us the familiar: teenage angst in a high school setting, the contrasting pressures to both stand out from the crowd and to conform to societal standards, and the confusing and all encompassing experience of first love(s). He also gives us the strange and unfamiliar in an alternate reality where things are stranger than fiction: superheroes are real... and they’re people you can fall in love with, maybe without even knowing who is behind the mask. And maybe they’re something you could become yourself — if you take the leap. I enjoyed this one immensely and I can’t wait to fly off into Nick Bell’s next chapter in the sequel.
TJ Klune’s writing hovers between earnest and amusingly absurd, rather just like our dramatic and painfully honest hero, Nick Bell. Klune deftly steers the reader from emotion to emotion, taking us along for the ride on Nick‘s (sometimes extra) highs and lows. Reading this, I was amazed that I could go from laughing aloud to near tears, sometimes within the same chapter, caught up as I was in Nick’s story and his emotions. In Extraordinaries, Klune gives us the familiar: teenage angst in a high school setting, the contrasting pressures to both stand out from the crowd and to conform to societal standards, and the confusing and all encompassing experience of first love(s). He also gives us the strange and unfamiliar in an alternate reality where things are stranger than fiction: superheroes are real... and they’re people you can fall in love with, maybe without even knowing who is behind the mask. And maybe they’re something you could become yourself — if you take the leap. I enjoyed this one immensely and I can’t wait to fly off into Nick Bell’s next chapter in the sequel.