Soon I Will Be Invincible!

_Soon I Will Be Invincible_ is a book by Austin Grossman. I just read it based on the review over at Girls Read Comics. If you want a more critical review, go over there and read that one. The following is my not terribly critical review.

I really liked this book, and it was mainly due to the viewpoints used to tell the story: Doctor Impossible, evil genius super villain, and Fatale, futuristic cyborg who gets offered a spot on the super-team, the Champions. Doctor Impossible is exactly how I imagined an evil genius would work: logical, crazy ideas that he does make work, a humorous inner monologue, and even self-awareness of his villainry (is that a word?). He's got the plan right from the start, and though the key idea isn't revealed until much later, if you are carefully watching the details it's certainly possible to work out what he's doing.

Fatale, on the other hand, is very new to her abilities, and has that out-of-place perspective when she gets invited to join the world's most famous super team. This works really well, because she has the same thoughts and is curious about the same things that I was, figuring out how the different people on the team interact, what their real back stories are, that sort of thing. She's also one of the best people on the team at analyzing the situation and so getting the perspective from her eyes is key.

Finally, I was completely surprised by a plot twist near the end of the book. There were two, actually, but one of them was completely surprising and I thought it worked really really well. I'm going to have to go back and read it again just to be able to verify all the clues that were there (and there were plenty, since we got to see both sides of the story, the heroes and the villain). The entire world setting was pretty neat as well, I'd be tempted to run a superhero game in the setting just because there's a ton of great heroes and villains mentioned in passing which would make great characters.

I highly recommend this book for a fun read, especially if you like superhero comics, or stories from multiple interesting viewpoints.