V Is for Villain by Peter Moore (review)

Brad Baron has the alliterative name, the family history, and the education to be a great hero—he just doesn’t seem to have any superpowers. His awesome older brother does in spades, which makes Brad’s demotion to his elite school’s less prestigious program even more embarrassing. Fortunately, the new program provides Brad with his first real friends, a group of renegades who see problems with their society’s hero worship—and who want to take it down, villain style. It turns out that Brad does have powers, illegal ones in the form of telepathy and mind control, and he just needed the right person (in this case, the gorgeous Layla) to help him develop them. Though the teens quickly get in over their heads by trying to impress one of the most dangerous bad guys of them all, they are a scrappy bunch, and they may actually shake up the status quo. The battle line scenes are effectively zippy, but it is actually the backstory of how some of the bad guys emerged that is most compelling in this novel—almost everyone is a pawn in someone else’s gene-splicing or population-control game, and no one group seems to have all of the information. Luckily for the reader, Brad, the intrepid narrator and budding supervillain, is brilliant and particularly adept at gathering the pieces, once he is made aware that all is not as it seems in this world where the heroes are so jerky they may be more villainous than their foes. Comic-book buffs and fans of the similarly themed Sidekicks by Jack Ferraiolo (BCCB 4/11) will appreciate the mix of humor and action and the tweaking of expectations of what makes one good or evil.