A review by brandongallant
Shadow Avengers: A Marvel: Crisis Protocol Novel by Carrie Harris

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No

3.75

Thank you to Aconyte and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

So this was my first venture into the Marvel Aconyte novels that have been being published for a couple of years now.  I kind of thought they were all standalone, but this one references Target: Kree pretty often and I regretted not reading that first for the context.  Fortunately, I'm very familiar with these characters already so I was easily able to jump in

The Shadow Avengers are made up of Doctor Strange, Luke Cage, Black Panther, Spider-Man, and Ms. Marvel.  It's a very interesting bunch of characters to have work together, although they pretty much pair up and throughout the story and don't work as a group except for a meeting at the beginning, and then again at the end.  Standing against them are Dormammu, Green Goblin, Loki, and Venom.  I liked this team of villains because not everyone has an equal and opposite member of the Shadow Avengers to fight.  We don't actually get to see a lot of the villains except for Venom, who is a point-of-view character.

There is not much character development going on, but that's not really surprising to me.  You can only change such well-known characters so much outside of the comics.  The fun part was really seeing the characters work together and try to figure out what's going on.  Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel are among my favourite Marvel characters and they're teaming up for a good chunk of this book.

The plot was pretty straight-forward and fun to read.  I would definitely add more books to my TBR that are written by Carrie Harris, and also more Marvel books published by Aconyte.  I recommend checking this one out!