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A review by balletbookworm
Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy
3.0
I ran across this Faith origin story by accident. I haven't been reading much YA lately so hadn't been checking the right catalogs. But I ran across this novelization of Faith's origin story by [a:Julie Murphy|6433278|Julie Murphy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561677712p2/6433278.jpg] so of course I needed to read it.
And this is good! If you don't already know who Faith is, she's a plus-sized superhero psiot WHO CAN FLY <3 from the Harbinger universe of Valiant comics. She's a pop culture nerd and a journalist. In this book, the plot takes place the fall after Faith's psiot abilities have been activated by the shady Harbinger Corporation and she escaped from the facility (the cover story was that she went to journalism summer camp). So now she's back home, keeping the secret that she can fly from her best friends Matt and Ches, worrying about her grandma who might have developing dementia, working her after school job at an animal rescue, writing for the school paper, and her favorite show - for which she runs a major fan blog - has started location shooting in her town. And then weird things start happening and people start disappearing.
Overall, this is a great way to get into the Faith-verse and Julie Murphy captured Faith's personality really well. Faith's world has always been very diverse and Murphy makes that very explicit in the book, both with respect to race/ethnicity and sexual orientation/gender. However, every character introduced is immediately given a physical description in one to two sentences, from Faith herself right down to the driver who picks her up at the TV show production parking lot and drives her to the office and is never seen again. After a while it got extremely rote, particularly because the book is narrated in the first person by Faith so the immediate descriptions felt awkwardly shoehorned in.
ETA: this is a prose novel since I keep seeing "graphic novel" coming up to describe this book; the character comes from comics but this book isn't a comic itself
And this is good! If you don't already know who Faith is, she's a plus-sized superhero psiot WHO CAN FLY <3 from the Harbinger universe of Valiant comics. She's a pop culture nerd and a journalist. In this book, the plot takes place the fall after Faith's psiot abilities have been activated by the shady Harbinger Corporation and she escaped from the facility (the cover story was that she went to journalism summer camp). So now she's back home, keeping the secret that she can fly from her best friends Matt and Ches, worrying about her grandma who might have developing dementia, working her after school job at an animal rescue, writing for the school paper, and her favorite show - for which she runs a major fan blog - has started location shooting in her town. And then weird things start happening and people start disappearing.
Overall, this is a great way to get into the Faith-verse and Julie Murphy captured Faith's personality really well. Faith's world has always been very diverse and Murphy makes that very explicit in the book, both with respect to race/ethnicity and sexual orientation/gender. However, every character introduced is immediately given a physical description in one to two sentences, from Faith herself right down to the driver who picks her up at the TV show production parking lot and drives her to the office and is never seen again. After a while it got extremely rote, particularly because the book is narrated in the first person by Faith so the immediate descriptions felt awkwardly shoehorned in.
ETA: this is a prose novel since I keep seeing "graphic novel" coming up to describe this book; the character comes from comics but this book isn't a comic itself