Small Town Hero

Small Town Hero
by Jessica Stank
(4/5 Stars)

Basically if you like Smallville on the WB/CW then you'd like this book. Alex Quinn is like a young Clark Kent in Smallville in that he's a farmboy in a small town, only rural Michigan instead of Kansas. Also, he's not an alien. In the old Stan Lee tradition his powers come from radiation when he's diagnosed with cancer. Well there's also an experimental drug that helps him to gain super strength and something that could be described as mood ring vision.

What holds the book back from being 5 stars to me is that the first half of the book is the teen romance between Alex and his next door neighbor Natalie. It uses rotating first-person to go from Natalie to Alex. And in the end Natalie doesn't do much except serve as bait for the villain, who is introduced through a little backstory in the hospital. Not focusing so much on the romance and also not using the rotating first-person would have allowed the antagonist to be developed properly. Or have just cut from Alex to the antagonist.

Then again I'm male so I don't appreciate romance as much as those of the female persuasion. Anyway, once it gets going it's a fun book. I'd recommend it for teens/tweens into superheroes.

That is all.