I enjoy superhero prose fiction. I'd enjoy it a lot more if more of the people who wrote it had a stronger grasp of basic writing mechanics - in this case especially tense, and most especially the past perfect tense - and weren't sloppy typists who make a lot of vocabulary errors, mangle idioms, and leave key words out of sentences or change grammatical direction halfway through, resulting in nonsense. But here we are.

Leaving all that aside (and it is theoretically possible, though unlikely, that it will be edited into slightly better shape before publication; I had a pre-publication version for review via Netgalley), this is a somewhat thoughtful piece of work that goes beyond "Bam! Pow!" and considers why henchmen might take up the dangerous occupation of henching. Jasper, a freelance henchman who works for several supervillains over the course of the book, does so because it's the only way he can get enough money to support his family and pay off the loan sharks into whose clutches he has fallen, and who are using the relatively small loan they made him as an excuse to extort from him arbitrary amounts of money with threats of violence against him and his family. He'd love to leave the henchman life, and indeed the city, but the mob won't let him.

What he can do is try to do at least something right, like save and subsequently help Switch, teenage son and sidekick of the Blue Eagle.

The Blue Eagle has almost the entire Superman power set - flight, strength, invulnerability, even eye beams - which struck me as unoriginal, but Switch can only manifest one power at a time, for an unpredictable and relatively brief period, and then has a cooldown period in which he has no powers at all. He does have super speed, which his father doesn't, and his super strength is greater than his father's.

His father is tough on him, and has no patience with the idea that people might turn to crime because they're out of good options, and maybe giving them more good options could reduce the crime rate - something Switch is beginning to believe. (Extra points to the author for not implying that this is the only solution that's needed for crime, or that other forms of crime prevention are worse than useless.)

There's a big supervillain plot, of course, to take over the city and then the world. And Switch knows about it because he's talked to Jasper, but doesn't think his father will listen to him, because (unlike in real life, where police use confidential informants all the time) his father won't want to hear about information gained from a criminal. <spoiler>And then his father flips round to believing him for, I felt, no adequate reason.</spoiler>

There are plot holes. <spoiler>For example, the mayor supposedly supports a project that makes no sense - a commercial development in a popular city park - because he's been mind-controlled, but the mind-control is only imposed on him at the event where he is announcing his support for the project.</spoiler> Things happen obviously because the plot requires them to, rather than because they make any sense whatsoever. And, as I already mentioned, the execution is rough in general. All this brings down a book that had good potential to the very bottom of the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list. It's only on there at all because the idea was at least original, and an original premise, however poorly executed, is becoming a rare thing these days.

This " superhero sidekick" novel is so heartwarming and cute. The characters are complex, some moments are emotional, others are fun. I love it.