Alliance

Alliance
by Jessica Stank
(4/5 stars)

Although this is book 2 of the series, I'd say most readers might as well just start reading it here. The weakness of the first book was that half of it was devoted to a teenage romance that in the end wasn't overly important. What was important is that Alexander Quinn was cured from cancer with an experimental treatment that gave him super strength and the ability to see people's auras, something I facetiously called mood ring vision. In the process, this brought Alexander to the attention of a billionaire criminal named Marcus who wanted to develop his own army of superpeople.

Now in Book 2 is when Alex actually starts to become a superhero, along with his new pal Jordan. Jordan develops ice powers after receiving some of the formula used on Alex. They decide to be a superhero team, but they're really lousy at it. They could actually use to read my "Practical Superheroism" series on my blog. They do employ some of it to develop costumes--or "uniforms" as they prefer--but they could use a lot of help in other areas like finding criminals.

Anyway, the evil Marcus is still around and worse than ever now that he's developed psychic powers and has a few superfriends of his own. Alex and Jordan manage to bumble and stumble their way into a confrontation with Marcus and his people.

Since there's less focus on romance this was a much more fun ride for me than the last one. The only problem is the end is flat. The confrontation with Marcus ends with about 15% left in the book. The good thing is there's still plenty of room left for future sequels. Hopefully in those Alex and Jordan will start to get their stuff together and be a little more Avengers and a little less Greatest American Hero.

BTW, in the book Alex's family faces money problems that threaten their farm. Something that occurred to me is: why doesn't Alex just enter one of those MMA tournaments where you can win a bunch of money for beating people up? Obviously he'd win since he can bench-press more than a ton and lift cows over his head and such. There seem to be thousands of those events per year so there's got to be one near Grand Rapids, right?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next book and meanwhile you should get in on the ground floor here. And while you wait for Book 3, you can read my superhero series! A Hero's Journey

That is all.