Review: Flawed, but really quite exceptional
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 21, 2013
Supers novels have been one of my favorite genres for a while, and I've had very few misses when purchasing the e-books.  Super Powereds is right up there with the best of what I've read, warts and all.The GoodExcellent character development.  You can tell how much work the author put into each of his characters, and given that this is presumably just the first book in a series, there's still a lot of growth to be chronicled.Good writing.  The author does a nice job of setting the picture for the reader, and the character's powers (both primary characters and others) were interesting and well thought-out.  There's also a nice, strong plot line.The BadI don't mind a long book, but the author positively *meanders* through his story at 800+ pages or whatever it was.  It's not to say I didn't enjoy the reading, but there were some chapters that didn't really need to be there in order to move the plot forward.  In addition, he waits until nearly the end before the reader starts getting any clue whatsoever about what forces are playing against the main characters.While he did an excellent job with the heroes in the story, I felt that the scene he set for the world they lived in was lacking.  It didn't feel like the reader was fully clued in on what the effect of supers was on a world not that different from the real one, and I didn't feel there was enough explanation about the derision directed towards powereds.  That particular plot point addresses a racism of sorts (powersism?), and was a very powerful subplot that didn't really get developed.The UglyAside from the length, the other thing that some strong editing could have helped was the typos.  There's a fair number of them, not every page, but enough that I had to regularly re-read a line to figure out what the error was and reinterpret.  Missing words, homonyms, an 's' tacked onto the end of a word where it wasn't supposed to be, that sort of thing.Truthfully, the ending felt like a rush job, like the author looked at his computer and thought, "Holy crap, we're at 800 pages, I need to wrap this thing up!"  Still, presuming I get the next book in the series in a timely fashion, I don't want to hold that too much against him.But hey, I still gave it four stars.  If the author can get out some more books in the series, I bet he could address the issues in 'The Bad', and with a little care and attention he could almost eliminate 'The Ugly'.  And that would make 'The Good' just that much better.