Yes! Finally finished it! I started reading this book a few months ago but got sidetracked by the arrived of the latest Young Bond and then I started Susan Hill’s writing course where she encourages us to read books that are a darn sight more ‘literary’ than Soon I will be invincible but as I had run out of recommended classics to read for a while (she currently wants us to send our first chapters in, I physically recoiled from the screen when I read that), I thought I’d resume reading the neglected aforementioned book.
I’ve written about Soon I will be invincible on here before, where I wrote my opinions on it up to p72, which is where I had stopped reading it and switched to Young Bond. I complained at the time that there was not that much action and Austin Grossman had spent too much time setting up the back story to all the characters. I wrote that I loved the chapters written from the viewpoint of the supervillian Doctor Impossible but was bored by the chapters written from the viewpoint of newbie superhero Fatale. Having now read it, I continued loving Doctor Impossible and Fatale got slightly more interesting but what I truly began to appreciate was (and eating my own words here) the origin stories to the superheroes and the supervillians. If you took the origin stories out there actually wasn’t much plot (it was a ‘basic’ supervillian taking over the world story, which crescendoed near the end of the book and actually got a little boring) but if you took the origin stories into account, it got a lot more interesting with explanations for each of the characters actions. As a (wannabe) writer I found it useful to see how well Grossman had weaved the backstory in with the main story line. I also thought it would make a great movie, a bit darker and more interesting than some of the saccharine superhero movies around.
