Review: City Without Heroes

City Without Heroes by Tanya Lisle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Errrrrr. Yes. Well.

I'm honestly just glad that's over.

I was actually looking forward to this one! I'm so skeptical of freebies from new authors but there's the occasional diamond in the rough and I thought this might be it. I was wrong.

It has a promising premise: In a world where heroes and villains are constantly destroying things, there's a town where superpowers are banned, and no hero or villain resides. Indira and her family are new in town, and soon discover it's not as peaceful as it seems ...

Now, I love me some superheroes. I read the summary and was like, 'oh, cool! That's an interesting new angle!' and I was excited. But - and I'm sorry for what is going to be brutal honesty here - the execution was horrendous. It's so incredibly slow and confusing. First we have Indy and her bro getting to know the neighbourhood, and it's pages and pages of their thoughts, with very little exciting information. I did not give two hoots about any of it. There are giant long conversations with utterly dull characters and in between there are loooooooong descriptions about boring things and then super confusing powers talk. I also had massive issues with there being no formatting marks to indicate when someone was using telepathy. You gotta give me some kind of sign that these giant paragraphs are people actually having a conversation, yo.

So then after all the boring, getting-to-know crap, there's the wishy washy explanations of how the city works and you know what? I didn't get it. I never really understood how the city works. How the laws are kept and why and also why everyone seemed to have powers anyway. Then how that all coincided with the 'don't talk about powers or the specks will hear you only we don't know it's the specks' crap. Also, a little more info on these 'specks', please? It was just all so damn confusing and it totally lost me at that point.

There was also something about a cute boy but that actually seemed underplayed here. Indira herself seemed to have bizarre emotions. Like, not even emotions, really, just reactions. Absolutely rubbish characterisation in general; the characters were not fleshed out at all and no one seemed overflowing in the emotions department. No attachments here, I'm sorry to say. Esther was probably the closest I came to liking a character but I still didn't really get her.

Honestly, I think what this book really needs is a great editor. Someone to weed out all the unnecessary garbage and bring attention to things that the author hasn't actually explained. I think sometimes writers spend so much time in the worlds of their creation that they forget to explain things because to them it's already known. This book needs some tough love and a lot more action and depth, but it does still have the potential to be an interesting story. I think there'd be plenty here to fascinate readers if it were explained properly.

With great patience, you may find a story here, but it was just too amateur for me. I'd probably recommend more for younger readers, though not for anyone with a short attention span.

With thanks to Voracious Readers and the author for my free e-copy to read and review.

View all my reviews