*received for free from netgalley for honest review* I am not sure how much i like this book, i mean the book itself was pretty weird, but i really hate the "This person is autistic so they are a robot" thing, so that was pretty annoying. once i got over that it was a pretty cool super hero read, kinda along the lines of invincible style comic but less graphic. Probably wouldn't reread but would recommend if someone told me they liked scifi

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
The book follows a young superhero named Advent 9 as he fights to save the city around him. His nemesis, tired of losing, brings an opposite version of him from a different universe to help defeat Advent 9. This plan backfires and the Doctor and Advent 9 must work together.
The story was interesting enough. It plays out as a typical superhero story in novel form. One interesting element is that Advent 9 is autistic, however, the way this is treated is not the best. His autism is treated as his biggest weakness and the way the Doctor discusses it is not great.
If you are a fan of superhero stories, this would be a good story for you.

I was excited at the premise of this book, but I felt it was poorly executed. At 65% in nothing of substance had really happening. I was most intrigued by the developing father-son relationship between villain and hero, but even that flatlined... if you're going to create a world of superheroes and supervillains, it best be exciting. This world, unfortunately, was not.

DNFd at about 60%

This book began as an intriguing story about an autistic superhero who's enemy creates an even stronger clone of him to try and take him down.

This book had such potential but it ran into some major issues.

First is the sheer amount of ableism and ableist tropes employed towards our main character. The villain is exceedingly ableist to him both before and after finding out he's autistic, the main character has a full blown meltdown about 'being broken' when he is told he's autistic and it's implied several times that he's not human and that's why he's autistic. All of these things came to a head when the villain, turned reluctant ally, refers to the MC as a changeling and at that point, I'd had enough and quit the book.

As well as being ableist, the book suffered a lot from pacing issues, so many things happened in such a short amount of time that I felt like i had read the first book and a half in a trilogy rather than 200 pages.

I couldn't finish it and I absolutely would not recommend it

This wasn't what I expected.

I thought that this would be a middle grade friendly book that I could listen to with my kids, but it is very much not.

This is a DC style comic book world that should be marketed in the adult genre. It's Superhero Fantasy genre, but not made for kids. I wasn't able to finish it because I had to quickly turn it off before my kids listened to anymore. Since I was provided this book as a promotion I am required to give it a star rating, but since I DNF'd it isn't fair for me to do so, so I'll rate it 3 stars to give it a relatively neutral rating, it might be a great book for a 13+ audience.

I am very sorry, but I did not like the book, and I did not like the narrator. The narrator thinks that because the novel is about super-heroics that every single line has to be over-expressed. I found that annoying.-- just narrate the story. The over-dramatics were not appreciated. As far as the story was concerned, I guess I thought the idea of a superhero who is on the autism spectrum to be kind of interesting, but the quality of the writing, plotting, and a characterization just did not live up to the promise of the story. I found that the book was quite mediocre in all manner of execution.

I really wanted to like this book. An autistic superhero. It is everything I want in a story. There are not nearly enough. That being said, I was disappointed. First I had a lot of questions which I think was on purpose, but instead of making me want to keep reading to find out more I just got frustrated. I was also really sad to find that autism was his weakness. I am also autistic and I did get a chuckle out of the fact that emotions were his weakness. But it was less funny the longer it went on.

2 stars

I would like to thank Tristellation Media and Netgalley for providing me with an audio ARC.

I don't dislike this book, but I also don't love it either. It was just okay for me. It is a bit darker than the description would suggest, but I was fine with that. I also thought the narrator was just fine. The characters are interesting as is the setting. I do wish some of it had been a bit more developed. I would have liked to see some of the relationships between the characters more developed. I cannot comment on the autistic representation.

I liked the idea of the story but I found myself confused by the narrator style and the futuristic story. It seemed like the narrator was from the thirties or forties but the story takes place in the future so I couldn't get into the groove of the story.
I also felt like the heroes and the villans easily exchanged their way of being and it made it hard to know who to root for.

The pace is also a bit slow for my taste.

I do love super heroe stories and morally gray characters so it was a good story for me in general.

At first, I really was enjoying the mystery in the book, but it quickly took a darker turn. This turn was something I was not expecting or prepared for. Had I known it was going to be as intense and dark as it was, I most likely would not have picked it up, Several parts also became very confusing to keep track of.

This title severely needs content and trigger warnings.

While the reader was magnificent, this book was not. It is hard to write a superhero book without it being in comic book form. I keep reading these kinds of books because when it is gold, it is gold. This was not that. It felt 1 dimensional and silly at times. I see where the author wanted to go with this, but it just didn't work.

I was kinda pumped when I got this audiobook from NetGalley. I mean who doesn’t love a superhero story?

This one had a lot of moments that I definitely liked, but I felt like it dragged on a lot. Some things got explained way too much, and it took away from the interesting aspects of the story.

So I got this audiobook from netgalley and I was excited about it because it was supposed to have an autistic superhero but this is not a traditional superhero story. For one it is bloody and gory and violent. I was unprepared for just how violent some of it would be and it should've been labeled as horror instead of this sort of made-up genre of superpunk whatever.

I think my biggest issue with this though was the narrator. I want you to imagine The opening credits of a action-packed suspense movie and the over-the-top dictated narration style because that is what the entire audiobook is. The entire thing. It eventually morphs into this over-the-top mansplaining voice character that just pissed me off. I feel like most women will know what I'm talking about when I say this because we have all had some mediocre middle-aged white man talk over us and explain something in such a dramatic way as if we are fucking stupid and that's how this narration felt for me.

I didn't like any of the characters and I really was uncomfortable with some of the autistic representation. It's not even that the representation itself was bad it was just the way that it was talked about. So in the summary it's talked about as being this character's vulnerability that his nemesis catches on to but we end up with the supposed villain referring to the superhero as broken and basically fucked up and it does kind of resolve itself at the end but not enough for me.

I also think that this lacked a lot of world building. We're thrown into this world from the POV of this superhero called Advent 9 and he doesn't really know who he is there's no way it came from All he knows is that he works to save the day and ends up fighting this like evil doctor dude. Well one day evil doctor dude said to trap for Advent 9 and turns off all the radio connections or something. Evil doctor dude has actually brought in Advent 9's alter ego from a different universe and he is everything that Advent 9 isn't.

Evil doctor dude quickly realizes that he has created an even bigger monster and he and Advent 9 have to kind of team up to fight against the alter ego. Alter ego goes off and just starts murdering people for funsies. Evil doctor dude and Advent 9 end up in this like catacomb kind of deal where they have to like fight these weird monsters that you don't really know who they are or why they're there all well Advent 9 is talking to these random hybrid creature things that no one else can see that turn out to be his emotions. If you're confused by my summary just imagine what the book is like. The world building is non-existent and you do not understand any of the setting that they're in. None of it makes sense.

My last issue is that there is a single woman/girl character in this and she is a gullible fan girl so obsessed with Advent 9 that she thinks that his alter ego is him and instantly falls in love and then ends up dead. For real? That's what you give us.

Honestly this whole entire book was a disappointment. Would not recommend.

I really enjoyed this superhero story. I know there are plenty outside of the DC/Marvel arena but I haven’t read a lot of them and it was cool to be in a world that doesn’t belong to them
The audio is narrated by Michael Kramer, who has been the voice of Fantasy in my ear for year, so it was interesting hearing his voice in a new genre. As always he gave a fantastic performance. 1.5x is my baseline for his narration.

The plot of this story is not doing anything groundbreaking as far as the superhero genre, but the characters are rich and engaging. They kept me invested in the plot and wanting to hear the rest of the story. I think that is kind of the core of superhero stories at this point anyway, to give us a familiar framework and deliver a character driven story.

There are a few over the top moments, and some major questions that went unresolved, but if you go in not expecting anything but a fun superhero story, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
I look forward to see what some members of the autism community think of this, as an outsider to that community I’m not sure how to weigh it’s portrayal within the story. I do appreciate that he never tried to “cure” it or anything like that.

All and all I had fun and would read another story in this world if written.