POWERLESS

A teenager discovers that the line between superheroes and supervillains isn’t as sharp as she supposed in this steamy collaboration.

Kenna gets her first hints that something is rotten in the Superhero League when a trio of squabbling supervillains breaks into her genius mom’s supposedly top-secret lab in a failed rescue attempt. Rescue? Who needs rescue? Kenna’s world is about to be rocked: by the discovery that the supposedly upright superheroes are capturing and torturing villains; by the sight of her own goth-punk best friend, Rebel, snogging one of the burglars (!)—and also by newly met Draven, a “dark and scowly” villain with sexy stubble and whose “icy blue irises burn like the hottest flames,” whose touch “sizzles,” and whose lips…ah. Kenna suddenly finds herself a fugitive engaged, along with a crew of unlikely allies, in a series of schemes to free the captives. In addition to the flaring of romantic torches, the continual, testosterone-fueled bickering of the male cast members and laughable worldbuilding (superpowers come with convenient marker tattoos beneath the right ear for heroes or left for villains) provide at least mild entertainment. The present-tense tale hustles readers along to a climactic, inevitably far-from-decisive face-off. Unsurprisingly, Kenna turns out to be far from the unpowered “ordinary” she had been raised to believe she was.

Readers beguiled by this fluff will need to stay tuned.