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A review by catevari
Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots by Seanan McGuire
4.0
The short review for this is that I loved this book a lot and it deeply satisfied a craving for a good superhero story in a way that other books I've read have not. I think this is probably my favorite thing that Seanan McGuire has written under her own name.
The longer review would observe that the book is not without some flaws, though. Velveteen Vs. The Junior Super Patriots is a progressive collection of short stories about a former teen superhero, Velma Martinez. That is, each story is a reasonably stand-alone adventure, but each story moves Velma/Velveteen along her journey to try and escape from her former team (or, really, Marketing, who runs the giant national superhero franchise) into the relatively safe state of Oregon.
Though published as a single novel, it has the feel of serial fiction and, I think, actually does a better and smoother storytelling job than McGuire's actual serial fiction experiment, Indexing (currently ongoing at the time of this review). But in both the case of Indexing and Velveteen, the stories feel slightly too short, in need of just a bit of embellishing flesh to go over such entrancing bone. To be clear, the story—at micro "episode" level and in the larger "arc" level—is perfectly complete. But they're so sparingly told that I found myself longing for a little more detail, a little more texture, a little more character and character interaction. A little more, period.
This was especially noticeable to me because there are several 'scenes' that are nothing but expository info-dumps about the world and the superhero business and Velma/Velvetine and her fellows that I kept wondering if McGuire could have inserted into the narrative less intrusively. Don't get me wrong: I love world building and McGuire is someone who builds incredible, imaginative worlds and so, in that sense, I eat that stuff up with a spoon…but I wish that she'd been able to incorporate that stuff into the actual story, instead of sticking it in like a "now loading" screen between set/scene changes.
But I really love Velma. Like a lot of my favorite authors, McGuire writes about characters who are damaged without wallowing in that damage or to satisfy some voyeuristic/atavistic thrill from the audience. Her characters got damaged because they went down swinging and, even in their broken state, they're still fighting tooth and nail. That's my kind of damage.
And despite my complaints, I found the story completely engrossing. I started out intending just to read a sample to see if I wanted to buy it. I raced through the sample and bought it. Then I ended up reading almost 40% of it before I was too tired to go on, in the wee hours of the morning. I finished it later that day. And I'm nearly heartbroken that the second volume isn't going to be out this week, as originally anticipated.
The longer review would observe that the book is not without some flaws, though. Velveteen Vs. The Junior Super Patriots is a progressive collection of short stories about a former teen superhero, Velma Martinez. That is, each story is a reasonably stand-alone adventure, but each story moves Velma/Velveteen along her journey to try and escape from her former team (or, really, Marketing, who runs the giant national superhero franchise) into the relatively safe state of Oregon.
Though published as a single novel, it has the feel of serial fiction and, I think, actually does a better and smoother storytelling job than McGuire's actual serial fiction experiment, Indexing (currently ongoing at the time of this review). But in both the case of Indexing and Velveteen, the stories feel slightly too short, in need of just a bit of embellishing flesh to go over such entrancing bone. To be clear, the story—at micro "episode" level and in the larger "arc" level—is perfectly complete. But they're so sparingly told that I found myself longing for a little more detail, a little more texture, a little more character and character interaction. A little more, period.
This was especially noticeable to me because there are several 'scenes' that are nothing but expository info-dumps about the world and the superhero business and Velma/Velvetine and her fellows that I kept wondering if McGuire could have inserted into the narrative less intrusively. Don't get me wrong: I love world building and McGuire is someone who builds incredible, imaginative worlds and so, in that sense, I eat that stuff up with a spoon…but I wish that she'd been able to incorporate that stuff into the actual story, instead of sticking it in like a "now loading" screen between set/scene changes.
But I really love Velma. Like a lot of my favorite authors, McGuire writes about characters who are damaged without wallowing in that damage or to satisfy some voyeuristic/atavistic thrill from the audience. Her characters got damaged because they went down swinging and, even in their broken state, they're still fighting tooth and nail. That's my kind of damage.
And despite my complaints, I found the story completely engrossing. I started out intending just to read a sample to see if I wanted to buy it. I raced through the sample and bought it. Then I ended up reading almost 40% of it before I was too tired to go on, in the wee hours of the morning. I finished it later that day. And I'm nearly heartbroken that the second volume isn't going to be out this week, as originally anticipated.