Book Review: Secondhand Origin Stories by Lee Blauersouth
Opal’s father should have been a superhero, but he used his powers to protect a neighbor illegally and wound up in jail. Ever since, Opal has kept her nose clean, excelling in school and decorum, in the hope of being licensed and redeeming the family name. Now she’s headed from Detroit to Chicago to try out for the most famous superhero team, the Sentinels.
Issac is the son of the Sentinels’ leader and the brilliant scientist that created his cybernetic prostheses, allowing the hero to continue his career despite severe injuries. He didn’t inherit his father’s powers, but is an intellectual prodigy in his own right. Issac wants to help the world with some nanotech he’s been developing to fix brain damage, but may have told the wrong people.
Jamie is Issac’s younger sister. Instead of powers or gadgeteering, she inherited a constellation of minor chronic conditions and borderline disabilities that makes her fragile and often ill. Her family is very protective of Jamie, which has isolated her from the outside world and left her rather naive.
Yael is possibly the most powerful Altered in existence. Unfortunately, the nature of xer powers makes it clear that xe is not the child of the man xe has called “Papa” all these years, but of two notorious supervillains. But no one will come out and say the truth to xer. Xer other living relative, Uncle Nodiah, has never even come to visit xer, despite being the head of the agency that sponsors the Sentinels!
When tragedy strikes, these four teenagers (and one other) will have to deal with dark family secrets, personal loss, prejudice, and a villain none of them were expecting.
This young adult novel is the first in a prospective “Second Sentinels” series, but thankfully is complete in itself. It takes place in a near future where “Altered”, people who have been given superpowers by advanced (but not always perfected) science, are common enough that there is a need to regulate them and license superheroes to deal with the issue.
The good: There’s a lot going on here. The story touches on institutional racism, the prison-industrial complex, gender and sexuality issues, disability, and of course the standard coming of age and dealing with a dysfunctional family subplots so common in YA literature. This gives the story layers, and makes it worth rereading. (On the other hand, parents who don’t like “politics” or “mature themes” in their kids’ literature may balk at this one.)
Yael, especially, is an interesting character, as xer ability to shapeshift has given xer a genderfluid identity. At one point Yael is arguing with xer Papa and shouts “I am not your daughter!” Then xe has to back up and explain that in this instance xe just meant that xe doesn’t identify as female.
This book uses the subplot of the adults stupidly keeping secrets from the young protagonists much better than SYLO, which I reviewed a while back. The parents and mentors have their own personalities, and we can see how guilt and fear prevent them from being honest about both past and current problems. The kids (except Opal) have subsequently developed their own tendency to keep secrets stupidly, and we eventually learn that some of the things they thought were secret could have been answered if it hadn’t been inadvertently trained into them not to ask.
Not so good: There’s a lot going on in this book, and sometimes the various pieces get in each other’s way; several ideas just sort of pop up and vanish because other themes are going on at the same time. The superhero aspect of the book gets buried for long sections.
There’s some salty language, which may be “realistic” but makes the book unsuitable for some more sensitive readers.
Odd: This might be an artifact of self-publication, but Issac’s name. At first I thought it was just one of those “make my kid unique” names like Yael, but then Isaac Asimov’s first name is also spelled “Issac” in the text, and our young protagonist is Jewish, so I don’t know.
Overall: An ambitious book that doesn’t quite fulfill its full potential, but well worth checking out at your library if you enjoy “relevant” but not necessarily realistic young adult fiction.
