A review by bojangles
Not All Himbos Wear Capes by C. Rochelle
emotional
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
2.5
I sat on this review for a really long time.
Deep inner sigh.
This book does that think I hate, typical of inexperienced fanfiction writers, where every event in the narrative is punctuated by italicized internal dialogue of the POV character.
As if experienced fanfic writers don’t do it too though, right?
Although the narrative is fast paced, and the sex scenes well written, the persistent interruption of the internal dialogue in italics breaks up the pace of the story in an exhausting way.
It’s also aesthetically a tedious and unpleasant way to add depth to a character.
Further, the villains in this story are weirdly under developed, which means that the stakes of any challenges faced outside of the challenges of the main relationship have basically no stakes. The anti-hero’s father is a clear MCU Thanos stand in. But it’s also very obvious from the get go that, in order to keep the story light hearted, this super powered super villain is never going to use his powers in a way that could threaten the romance. So for all the time the narrative spends building up the tension around what all the different superheroes and villains are capable of, the central commitment of romance (the happily ever after) makes this conceptually hard to pull off. Superhero narrative of course usually have the hero win, or end up in a bitter sweet place of having earned valor even if they lost “everything”. There is of course the anti hero MMC, which I think is the author’s attempt at making narrative and conceptual space for there to be real stakes to what the villains do, by allowing moral grey area in a genre that typically only allows the “good guy” to get their dream partner.
But at the end of the day, the reason this gets 2.5 stars is because the overall story, although sexy and fun, and at times laugh out loud funny, is bogged down by the truly awful italic inner dialogue after every single paragraph. (Or every sugle scentence in some parts of the book!!!) Writing good sex scenes of hard, so I commend the author for pulling them off. And the world building around how super powered humans have shaped modern geopolitics was genuinely interesting and compelling. So much so that I was tempted to read the second book, just to learn more about the world and how supers function as state agents. But in the end, I decided against it. I can’t overlook that little “verbal quirk” of bad writing when the main characters aren’t have sex.
Deep inner sigh.
This book does that think I hate, typical of inexperienced fanfiction writers, where every event in the narrative is punctuated by italicized internal dialogue of the POV character.
As if experienced fanfic writers don’t do it too though, right?
Although the narrative is fast paced, and the sex scenes well written, the persistent interruption of the internal dialogue in italics breaks up the pace of the story in an exhausting way.
It’s also aesthetically a tedious and unpleasant way to add depth to a character.
Further, the villains in this story are weirdly under developed, which means that the stakes of any challenges faced outside of the challenges of the main relationship have basically no stakes. The anti-hero’s father is a clear MCU Thanos stand in. But it’s also very obvious from the get go that, in order to keep the story light hearted, this super powered super villain is never going to use his powers in a way that could threaten the romance. So for all the time the narrative spends building up the tension around what all the different superheroes and villains are capable of, the central commitment of romance (the happily ever after) makes this conceptually hard to pull off. Superhero narrative of course usually have the hero win, or end up in a bitter sweet place of having earned valor even if they lost “everything”. There is of course the anti hero MMC, which I think is the author’s attempt at making narrative and conceptual space for there to be real stakes to what the villains do, by allowing moral grey area in a genre that typically only allows the “good guy” to get their dream partner.
But at the end of the day, the reason this gets 2.5 stars is because the overall story, although sexy and fun, and at times laugh out loud funny, is bogged down by the truly awful italic inner dialogue after every single paragraph. (Or every sugle scentence in some parts of the book!!!) Writing good sex scenes of hard, so I commend the author for pulling them off. And the world building around how super powered humans have shaped modern geopolitics was genuinely interesting and compelling. So much so that I was tempted to read the second book, just to learn more about the world and how supers function as state agents. But in the end, I decided against it. I can’t overlook that little “verbal quirk” of bad writing when the main characters aren’t have sex.