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Eviltwinjen's review

Soon I Will Be Invincible: A Novel
by Austin Grossman (Goodreads author!)

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/645180.Soon_I_Will_Be_Invincible_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Soon I Will Be Invincible: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1176689611m/645180.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/645180.Soon_I_Will_Be_Invincible_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Soon I Will Be Invincible: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71155.Austin_Grossman">Austin Grossman</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4911752?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 4 of 5 stars<br/>A highly promising debut from an author who clearly loves and knows comics and their archetypes. Grossman has tons of good ideas--so many that he can't begin to develop them all and you end up just sitting back and enjoying watching them streak by. The actual plot--the who done it, or more accurately the why they done it--isn't as complex as you might wish or expect, but it's not really the point. This is a literary novel, although a fun, fast, engaging one, and Grossman is here to explore his characters' psyches. The pleasure of the book is watching the personalities reveal themselves: Doctor Impossible, a socially awkward genius who knows early on that he's never going to fit in with the hero in-crowd, and Fatale, a young woman without much sense of self who allows herself to be made into a cybernetic super-soldier. The New York Times review complained that Fatale pales as a character beside the fascinating Dr., but I personally found much to connect with in her. She doesn't quite fit in with the heroes either, and part of her journey is just realizing that she's allowed herself to become lost in her superheroine role.
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<br/>Of course, Dr. Impossible gets all the best lines. There are some great one-liners in there (he recalls the abrupt end of his graduate studies: “a clumsy lab assistant come to a tragic end, the beginning of Doctor Impossible’s long, impossible doctorate.”), and Grossman makes you like and even root for a man who endlessly, fruitlessly tries to win the world's appreciation and understanding by threatening to take it over. He eventually realizes it's not making him happy, but he just can't stop...which is what makes him a villain, a sufferer from "malign hypercognition disorder" as it's known in Grossman's superpowered world. 
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  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/284205?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Eviltwinjen's review
rating:
bookshelves: comics
recommended for: Comics fans, high school angst fans, nerd fans

A highly promising debut from an author who clearly loves and knows comics and their archetypes. Grossman has tons of good ideas--so many that he can't begin to develop them all and you end up just sitting back and enjoying watching them streak by. The actual plot--the who done it, or more accurately the why they done it--isn't as complex as you might wish or expect, but it's not really the point. This is a literary novel, although a fun, fast, engaging one, and Grossman is here to explore his characters' psyches. The pleasure of the book is watching the personalities reveal themselves: Doctor Impossible, a socially awkward genius who knows early on that he's never going to fit in with the hero in-crowd, and Fatale, a young woman without much sense of self who allows herself to be made into a cybernetic super-soldier. The New York Times review complained that Fatale pales as a character beside the fascinating Dr., but I personally found much to connect with in her. She doesn't quite fi...more

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