/lit/ - Literature

>>15632247
Firefight - Brandon Sanderson, Reckoners #2, Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic Superhero Urban Fantasy, 2015
1st book read ~6 years ago, 3.5/5
The cover is extraordinarily awful. This isn't part of Cosmere.
The following is written in a style consistent with the book.

I had forgotten much of the first book, so it took me a while to get back into it. I really ought to read series as they are released and all that have been already released in short order, as I do for other media. I'm currently trying to correct that.
Finding western urban fantasy books that I enjoy has been exceedingly difficult for me. Same for superhero. I don't read the standard sort of western superhero comics for a variety of reasons. This series so far has had many similarities to The Boys by Garth Ennis which ended a year before Steelheart, the first book in the series, was released and seems like a YA version of it.
What the author was going for with the characterization of the 19 year old male protagonist remained unclear to me. Early on the protagonist boasts that he's murdered dozens of people. He often comes off as more as a nigh autistic ideological mass murderer than someone fighting for the welfare of others, even in terms of self-identification, though more so with his interactions to others. His level of self-awareness is rather inconsistent as well. It's not quite to the level of Dexter Morgan from Dexter. Then there are passages like this, "I doubted Lulu carried grenades in her bra, ample though it was." and "Many Epics behaved like ordinary people, save for their absolute lack of morals" which is ironic but it wasn't really explored since the protagonist doesn't behave like an ordinary person and has an idiosyncratic set of morals. The whiplash between describing how awesome it feels to murder to #notallepics annoyed me. The Reckoners organization also reminded me of the assassin's order in the first Assassin's Creed and generally how that progressed by the end.
Although various girls are thrown at him, the protagonist keeps telling himself that all he wants and needs is his waifu, which causes problems with the other female characters. His relationship to his waifu is also rather distorted, as he describes not actively being murdered by her as true love and her saying how sweet his plans to kidnap and imprison was. It's unfortunate when love, sex, violence, and death are felt as the same.
"Her dark African American skin" Was it necessary to put African American there? It's rather silly.
As a marginally relevant aside, I didn't like what I watched of Powers and Heroes and Agents of Shield were meh. Misfits and The Boys were my most enjoyed relevant western tv series, though I didn't agree with a lot of the choices made in the TV series of the latter, so I enjoyed the former more overall.

3/5
TL;DR: Unpowered guy with a waifu complex continues to kill superpowered people because power literally corrupts, though his superpowered waifu is exempted.