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New Heroes: The Quantum Prophecy
The New Heroes:
The Quantum Prophecy
Michael
Carroll
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this book from Amazon
What to Expect:
There used to be superheroes. What if they came back? What if one of them
was you? All by our resident Sprout!
Review by Richmond
Clements
18th May
06
First in a new trilogy!
How these words can fill
the heart of even the most seasoned reader with dread. However, I can guarantee
that by the end of this volume, you’ll be shouting for the next one, rather
than making it your mission in life to avoid reading it.
So, what’s it about
then? I can hear you ask.
The story is set in a world
where, ten years ago, for reasons we are not privy to initially, all the world’s
superheroes and villains disappeared during an epic battle. A battle we are thrown
into in the action packed prologue. There is an initial jarring. Not because of
the writing, it’s just that it takes a moment to adjust to the idea of reading
about superheroes, rather than looking at pictures and speech bubbles.
The reader is introduced
to our main protagonists, a couple of young boys living their normal mundane life
in an unnamed British (or Irish?) city. Then… stuff happens to them. The
boys exhibit the kind of behaviour that is nothing less than the deepest dream
of every boy that age. As their powers emerge, the plot does too, and the previous
ten years of secret and deceit gradually unravel around the boys.
That’s basically what
happens, but it is not the story.
There is a fundamental rule
in story telling, and you would be amazed how many writers out there either do
not know it, or worse, do not understand it. The rule is this: there is no such
thing as a ‘bad guy’. Even the bad guy, from his point of view, is
doing the right thing. So it’s refreshing to see an author not only remember
this rule, but tackle it head on in the way Carroll does here. Indeed, this provides
some of the best scenes in the book, as Carroll’s characters face their
own preconceptions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in a way that
is seldom seen in so-called ‘adult’ fiction, never mind young readers
books like this one.
The book is asking deep
questions. Can you do bad things for good reasons?
Carroll doesn’t have
the answer to this, as his characters are real people, they each react to their
situations in believable ways, so the reader is left thinking that all of them,
yes even the ‘bad guys’ are doing what they’re doing for their
own right reasons.
Now, this might make the
book sound like a rather dry tome, filled with long conversations concerning the
nature of good and evil. You’d be wrong.
The book is written with
a brilliant economy, and fairly rattles along from one action scene to the next.
It is funny and inventive, with the descriptions of the superpowers being of particular
note. It’s something I have rarely got from reading comics: to feel what
it was like to have these fantastic powers.
I loved this book. Then
I read it to my eight year old son, and he loved it too. In fact, more than once
he was literally jumping up and down with excitement at the action.
Like all good works, this
is neither an adult book nor a young reader’s one: it a good book. No, not
good, great.
I warn you now though: the
second volume is not published until October this year. Carroll ends this book
at just the right point to leave the reader desperate to find out what happens
next.
I can’t recommend
this enough.
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this book from Amazon
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