Friday, November 16, 2012

The Superheroes Union: Dynama by Ruth Diaz (REVIEW)

The worst part about having your e-reader die is losing access to your carefully managed queue of review titles. While I'm (barely) managing to muddle through with a cheap tablet, trying to reconstruct that queue from titles scattered across email, my laptop, my PC, and my cloud drive has proven to be a challenge. As a result, I am woefully behind with some titles . . . but persevering. :)

A romantic bisexual superhero adventure, The Superheroes Union: Dynama is a wonderfully fun piece of fiction from Ruth Diaz. The basic premise is as crazy as it is original - when her supervillian ex-husband escapes from prison, a retired superhero is forced to break out the spandex once again, leaving her kids with a nanny who specializes in superhero families . . . and with whom she falls in love.

What I loved most about the tale is the fact that Diaz doesn't try to recreate the feel of a superhero comic book adventure. Hers is very much a story of people, emotions, relationships, and (most importantly) consequences. She looks at the very human awkwardness of a messy divorce, and the equally human awkwardness of a new relationship, all within the context of a world where superpowers are a fact of life, not a driving force. There's are no grand schemes of world domination to thwart, just relationships to be resolved or mended.

TJ/Dynama is a wonderfully complex character, one who makes you believe that a woman can be a wife, a mother, and a superhero all rolled into one. She's neither perfect nor infallible, and makes the same bad kind of decisions any of us could make. As for Annemarie, the first word that comes to mind when I think of her is 'cute'. She is just such an adorable character, she actually comes across as less authentic than her superpowered lover, which may not have been an intentional twist, but one that I enjoyed.

Overall, this was a quick, fun, feel-good read, and one with a happy ending that still leaves room for more stories in Diaz's world.



[Reviewed by Sally]

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