A review by chukg
All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault by James Alan Gardner

4.0

I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Lots of local colour about the University of Waterloo (or an alternate fictional version of it, anyway), and the book itself feels like a cross between a prose superhero novel and an urban fantasy with vampires in. While I was reading it I kept thinking that it almost seemed like a role-playing game -- there are ground rules established, the author goes into detail about how the various powers and creatures work, and there is a lot of creative use of abilities and interesting situations. It also has some good character development, especially of the narrator and her diverse roommates/teammates. (In the afterword, the author mentions specific RPGs and it was exactly the ones I was thinking of while reading it. That said, the book does stand on its own -- it doesn't read like someone just wrote down what happened in their gaming sessions. I would read a sequel for sure.)