This was a pretty crazy ride! I loved the perspective of an obvious millennial, just trying to hustle, using her skills plus the internet to call out injustice (and land her dream job). There were some slow parts, and the ending was a lot to handle, but i enjoyed it and will definitely recommend it!

My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC copy of this book available to me.

Such a fun read! This novel is set in a world that has superheroes and supervillains, but is told from the viewpoint of one of the henchmen of the villain set. Used to performing behind-the-scenes tasks, primarily bookkeeping, the protagonist gets pulled in to attending an event with her villain boss at which she gets badly injured by a hero. As a result, she starts looking in to the actual cost in lives and lost man-hours that these battles cause. And she just gets sucked in deeper and deeper. This book was a refreshing look at heroes and villains and how they affect those around them.

Readers and fans of John Scalzi's "Redshirts" will want to take a look at this book, and vice versa.

What a delightful book! You would expect it would be graphic novel but no—it’s a novel about graphic novel heroes! Original, witty and surprisingly touching. Highly recommended

Fiendishly clever, this book managed to elicit evil laughter from me. This book is so much smarter than anything else available in this genre. It is wonderfully well written with rich, deep characters that are fun to relate with. It reads like an epic, taking the reader through the modest origin of the main character, Anna as she moves through the world of villainy.. I hesitate to reveal a single detail of the book for fear it would detract from any of it’s fun. Just know that it will give you a glimpse of that it’s like to be on the other side of the fight between good and evil. A glimpse that might just change your mind on where good and evil begin and end. I certainly hope that this is the beginning of many more stories from a talented author about a compelling universe.

I really like this book. I liked the narrative voice, I liked the kind if humor and I liked the twist on the usual superhero narrative. I definitely want to read more from the author.

This is the best superhero novel that I’ve read in years!!! I follow Seanan McGuire’s twitter feed, and I pay special attention to her book reviews, because I know she reads a lot of ARCs and I know she only writes about things she loved. So I knew that when Hench showed up on NetGalley I needed to request it. Thankfully, I got an eARC because it meant I got to read it early!!! Hench is a book told from the point of view of Anna, a woman with a talent for spreadsheets and data analysis who works as hired help for supervillains. This is a world where villains can be Evil when they try to extort the mayor and equally evil when they fail to provide medical benefits. Anna has a fascinating journey exposing all of the flaws of the Good vs Evil tropes that make up this subgenre. This book compares quite favorably to The Velveteen Vs. series by Seanan McGuire and to Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, and I can’t wait to read the next book by Natalie Zina Walschots. This is a must buy!!

Hench is not a book I would typically choose to read, however, the description (and my love of villains) swayed my decision. In this debut novel, Walschots creates a world of heroes and villains. When the main character, Anna, goes to a temp agency, she is sent to the Electrophorous Industries (part of the villainous world), where her talents working with data and spreadsheets turn into a life-changing event. Hench is the story of power, revenge, and relationships. It is the best combination of Disney villains and the Marvel superheroes.

Alex McKenna pulls off great narration for the audiobook by successfully creating voices for all of the book characters and brings them to life. Full disclosure, I listened and read along with the eBook for the first half of the book. I then began to simply listen. I was engrossed in the narration and felt I was able to picture the action better in my mind.

Even if you are not a fan of sci-fi, fantasy, or graphic novel-like books, you should give this book a chance. I never read comic books growing up (yes, I am old enough to call them comic books), but I did watch Batman on TV, and I absolutely love the Marvel movies (Deadpool is my favorite). This is a combination of the best parts of all of these.

Anna is a temp worker who does accounting for supervillains. It's even less glamorous than it sounds. When the superhero Supercollider gently nudges Anna while thwarting her current boss's wicked plans, the blow destroys her femur. She grapples with her life-altering injury the only way she knows how: spreadsheets. Soon, her meticulous accounting of the collateral damage caused by “heroes” attracts the attention of the biggest bad guy around, Leviathan. He wholeheartedly endorses her plan to fix the superhero problem in a way that is both hilariously petty and shockingly malicious. A blend of snark and darkness that tackles the ethical questions other scifi stories dare not.

This book was so enjoyable. I really liked the premise of looking through the world of Superheroes through the eyes of a hench. To actually qualify the costs of the damage and destruction to property and lives because a superhero came in to save the day. I really enjoyed the humor but most of all the message that everyone should count.

Anna is a boring temp for super villains. She does data entry and whatever other menial jobs pay the rent, because everyone needs office workers, even villains. When her world is turned upside down by a “super hero,” when she’s badly injured. She gets laid off, of course, and becomes obsessed with the collateral damage inflicted by the actions of super heroes. When she catches the attention of a famous super villain, she’ll start devising a plan that could take down her arch nemesis, and tell the world about the damage that their heroes cause.

This one is long, and there’s a ton to unpack. It took me months to finish, but I blame COVID for that, not the book. I was super excited when I got approved for an advance listening copy, because I was LOVING the print book, but just couldn’t focus long enough on any print to get through more than a chapter or two at a time. The listening copy allowed me to dive back into this world wholeheartedly and with my full attention.

I loved Alex McKenna’s narration. I had no trouble following the plot, and her tone changes for some of the characters not only helped me keep them straight, but it really gave them personality. I especially loved Leviathian’s scraggly, raspy voice. I tend to prefer lady or femme presenting narrators anyway, and I’ll be seeking out more of McKenna’s work.

This one is on sale next month, so if you need an anti-hero to root for, or just want a new perspective of the super hero troupe, Walschots has done a great job reimagining this magically realistic world.

Great characters, good story, fun twist on superhero stories. Would be very okay with this being the first in a series of books.

Had some trouble remembering who some characters were towards the end.

In a world where superheros and supervillains are real, Anna Tromedlov takes gigs temp agency that seeks to hire hench-people to do data entry, tech work, drive getaway cars, crack safes, etc. for the villain side of the equation. The job goes wrong and Anna is grievously injured by a superhero and loses her gig. I recently watched Superman 2 with my son, the old one with Christopher Reeves and Terence Stamp, and we actually had a conversation about what happens to all of the people who get blown away by Zod, Ursa, and Non's superbreath (that's a helluva movie by the way), especially in a world where everyone's health insurance has shocking deductibles, or what happens to the business owner who had his hotdog stand demolished by a flying manhole cover or a tossed city bus. Anna Tromedlov knows the cost of superhero shenanigans and she sets out to document them, eventually catching the eye of *the* biggest supervillain of them all, who asks her to work for him. This has great queer rep and a lot of snark and Walschots can turn some very nice phrases (off the top of my head, thinking of Anna's broken leg as "ground beef and porcelain wrapped in someone else's skin"), but some of the drama of the many traumatic situations that Anna was pushed into as a result of her work never felt particularly tense or concerning to me for some reason. The ending is staggeringly abrupt and a little disappointing.

Anna is a Hench - working for a temp agency that hires out temporary help to villains in a world where superheroes, villains, their sidekicks, and henches are a part of everyday life. Injured on the job and out of work, her curiosity and inherent talent for data crunching lead her to start a project tallying the collateral damage of superheroes. Her talents are spotted by one of the biggest villains and she is soon working for him. Anna is smart and resilient and sometimes a little snarky. I really liked her friends and coworkers too, they are a solid bunch of unique and diverse characters. The heroes and villains that populate their world are as bored, arrogant, and issue-filled as any human. The pacing is well-done, lots of detail, and character-building without slowing down a bit. It's a good thing that it moves right along because the chapters in my advance copy were very long. Hench is definitely not a story I've come across before and I enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you to HarperCollins and Netgalley for the advance reader's copy.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me this copy in exchange for review.
WOW this book was fun. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I thought the premise was interesting, and the plot kept pulling me through the very end. I think The Auditor and her relationship with Quantum was my favorite out of everything, probably. I wish the author had continued to include and discuss some of Anna’s team and earlier work friendships nearing the end, because I found myself missing that dynamic in the last third of the book. At the beginning, some of the pacing threw me off a little bit, but once the story got going I caught on and didn’t have any other structural complaints past that. Over all, a good fun time, and I’m interested to see where this series goes! 4/5

Rating: 5/5 Heroic Henches

Format: ebook. I’d like to thank HarperCollins and NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What it's like: This book reminded me a lot of the premise of the Amazon show The Boys. The darker side of heroes, the collateral damage inflicted, and revenge being the main focus.

To sum up:
This is a story about a smart Hench woman called Anna, who primarily works behind the scenes for various villains in a world of Superheroes. She is good at numbers and usually stays away from fieldwork, until one day when she is asked to step up to the foreground during a mission that goes catastrophically wrong. During the aftermath, she finds a new purpose, in tallying the toll in human lives that heroes cause the world. Her work draws the attention of a Supervillian who employs her and that’s when her work really begins. It is a story about what truly makes a hero and what makes a villain, about recovery and finding purpose in the importance of accountability and transparency, and the everyday bravery of people behind the scenes just trying to show the world the truth.

What I loved:
There is a lot to love in this book! It is funny, it’s grim, it’s shocking and raw, but most of all, it’s a reflection on why every person in a society, no matter their station, should be held accountable for their actions. It seems like every day we hear about another person that has done or said horrible things in the shadows. It can get exhausting, but this book reminds you that this is crucial work. Truly understanding the companies we endorse, the leaders we choose, and people we see as heroes may not always be pretty but it is vital to our democracy and our society.

I loved that Walschots chose a main character that feels so very ordinary. She doesn’t have special powers. She isn’t rich, she isn’t particularly charismatic, she is just an ordinary person who has been hurt badly. Her journey through recovery and finding a cause worth sacrificing everything for was beautiful and inspiring.

This book definitely makes you look at the idea of “heroes” and “villains” in a different way. It shines a heroic light on the people who attempt to find unbiased truth and share it with the world. It reminds us that we all have the ability to be heroes as well as villains.

Overall, I don’t have anything bad to say about this book! It was fast-paced, it was emotional, brutal, and unflinchingly honest with its characters and messages. Any fans of superheroes should definitely give this a try.


Trigger warnings:
There are some very graphic violent scenes in this book, death, and domestic abuse.

If superheroes actually existed, they'd be terrifying. How many buildings are knocked down in epic superbattles? How much collateral damage is ignored while the hero focuses solely on the villain and perhaps the one important person who's been put in danger? And absolutely no one cares about the henchpeople far outmatched by the hero that rush in anyway and get taken out almost as an afterthought.

And no one thinks about who does the data entry that keeps supervillain R&D running. Those death rays aren't gonna build themselves.

Hench is a great look at the ins and outs of superheroics. It takes a good hard look at the tropes and finds them wanting. Anna, our protagonist, worked as a hench on the data entry side of things until a superhero left her so badly damaged she would never walk without a limp again. That sent her into a spiral of data and calculations that led her to calculate exactly the cost superheroes had on the world, and the answer is enough to make her want to take action. It's data scientist vs superhero in a slow but brutal battle that will test the superhero more than any villain or natural disaster and might cost the data scientist a lot more than just a functional leg. If she can even survive.

It's a love letter in the same vein of John Scalzi's Redshirts or Sarah Rees Brennan's In Other Lands. The sort of book that highlights the inherent issues in the genre as thoroughly and viciously as only someone who loves these stories very much can. It's gorgeous, funny, heart-wrenching, casually queer, and most of all, fascinating in that keeps you on the edge of your seat way. Do not read before bed unless you've accepted you may not actually sleep that night. It's that hard to put down.

A peek behind the Super-villain curtain is only the framework for this wonderful comic book novel set in a world where superheroes are not only real, but they are sought out at a very young age. Behind the scenes for each hero or villain are busy work teams of "henches" and "kicks" plus a few "meat" to handle the physical stuff. When a temp gig as a hench goes terribly wrong for Anna she begins to take a look at the big picture, something that takes her down a previously unimaginable road into the truths and lies behind superhero culture. In the tradition of all great comics, the fantasy has a great deal to say about our modern world touching on the blurred line between good and evil, the entitlement of #metoo, and modern work culture. It's a fantastically fun and inventive read, a pleasure for readers of comics, graphic novels, sci-fi/fantasy and genre blending readers everywhere.

This was phenomenal!

Anna Tomedlov, later known as The Auditor, is an out of work hench. Her last job ended and she's been struggling to get into a new role with a villain who could use her data skills. After a quick application at the temp agency, she gets assigned to the Electric Eel. The job is boring, it's a lot of recalculating information on known identities of superheroes, but hey, it pays. Then she gets told that she is expected to be at his press conference, mostly to correct the ratios of Meats (muscle) and make it look like Electric Eel is an equal opportunity villain. What starts with the kidnapping of the mayor's son, ends with her leg completely destroyed as the superhero, Supercollider, throws her across the room in his attempt to clean up the rest of the Meat as Electric Eel escapes. After multiple surgeries, hospital time, and an unknown amount of recovery and physical therapy needed, Anna has nothing but time. While she spends a lot of it wallowing in self pity staring at her depleted bank account, she also begins to realize that she's not the only one that was injured/destroyed that day. With the damage that Supercollider did, it ends up being around 140 years of human life destroyed, and hundreds of thousands dollars of property damage.

Anna gets pissed.

She digs into the superheroes' pasts and starts tallying up all of the time in human life lost and all the money in property damage done, and starts a blog. She doesn't think that it will get a lot of traction, she's not really doing it for anyone but herself. Except people start to notice. Someone else runs the numbers and realizes that she's being conservative with her numbers. Maybe these superheroes aren't worth it, since it doesn't seem like they are caring for the lives of those they're supposed to be saving. This brings her to the attention of The Leviathan. The background of The Leviathan isn't really well discussed. He was once under the mentorship of a superhero, who was also doubting the ways things were going. His mentor dies, and The Leviathan has taken it upon himself to bring down superheroes. This is where Anna comes in. After being whisked away to his compound and healed up, she is given her own team to start figuring out how to take these superheroes down.

Filled with raw human emotions, the fight between good and evil, and such a satisfying ending, this book takes the hero story and turns it on its head. I loved everything.

Copy provided by NetGalley.

WOW! I wasn't sure about this book when I started it but it blew me away!

We've all been saturated in, and loving, the current wave of superhero movies, but they have all have a certain...optimistic viewpoint? <i>Hench</i> posits a different view: what if superheroes and supervillains were normal people with the normal foibles, good, bad or venal, of humans? And what if the superheroes end up doing far more damage then the supervillains in "saving the day?"

The result is an absolutely enthralling story of a normal person dealing with a world that is a combination of the Sokovia Accords (Marvel) and the current protests on policing. I stayed up far past my bedtime just to finish this book.

If you have a sci fi book group, this book would be a perfect book to discuss. Highly recommended for all.

Hench is a dynamic story about superheroes, super-villains, and the people that work for them. Anna Tromedlov is a fascinating character that works as a temp for the villains. She's a fresh voice in a genre that's had more ups and downs than any other. While normally supers don't work for the novel format, Walschots makes it work by changing the point of view. Thus transforming a genre that relies most of the time on too much power and not enough heart. Hench is more than a story about supers, it's about the ordinary people; it's about living in a world torn apart by what it means to be good and evil- especially when not everything is as clear cut as it seems.