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A review by caughtbetweenpages
Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
This book follows Miles Morales as Spider-Man a little further down his timeline, where the superpower honeymoon period is ended and now he has to not only balance these new superpowers with being a teenage boy and having his real life catch up to him (because it didn't really stop once his superpowers began), all the while his superpowers are, as far as he knows, going a little bit haywire and acting up on him. So Miles is an Afrolatino boy from a poor community in New York, and in addition to witnessing how poorly his community are treated by people who are not part of it, he also has a foot in this other world as he is on scholarship at a super prestigious high school. He feels a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed; he's not just doing it for himself, the people that he grew up around are seeing him/his success and attaching a lot of hope to it, so the pressure from this is extreme. And at the same time while he's at boarding school he is one of very few Black students there so he's got this very specific and tight rope to walk, especially when one of his teachers begins to act incredibly racist towards him, and while he's there he has very little (if any) support to sort of mourn and come to terms with and experience the horror of the Black boys in his community who are slowly going missing. Nobody's talking about it and obviously the cops aren't doing anything. So while trying to figure out (1) what's going on with his superpowers, (2) what's going on with all of these young Black men going missing, (3) figuring out who is the person who's trying to get him kicked out of/losing his scholarship to attend this university, Miles is also having to figure out internally (4) how to find a balance between his anger as a tool for enacting change to actually get these things solved, and a restraint because very often that selfsame anger is used to demonize young Black men when they show it outwardly. And of course, it wouldn't be a Spider-Man story if Miles did not, throughout all of this, (5) have to reckon with what it means to have his powers and what responsibilities should be his now that he has them versus how he can use them for his own gain.
One thing I really liked about Reynolds's book is that I think he writes children very honestly. The ways that Miles acts when he is at school with his friends, or getting really flustered and tongue tied around his crush, or having stage fright in terms of sharing poetry that he has written, all of that felt very honest and true to a teenage mindset and the preoccupations and priorities that a 16-year-old would have, whether or not they had superpowers. I also love that at no point (despite Miles having these superpowers) was there ever any question of him being a kid. When he's interacting with his mom and dad--despite them not being preternaturally gifted with speed and dexterity and, like, magical spiderwebs that shoot out of their wrists--when Miles feels scared and in trouble, they are who he turns to and they provide a source of comfort, and it's really good to see a kid so loved on page. And that was made all the more true by the contrasting examples that Jason Reynolds put all around Miles, of people who didn't have so close a relationship with their parents or didn't have one at all, and how those different familial structures, and a lack of or an overabundance of support, change the way that kids are enabled to thrive.
Another thing that as a Spider-Man Enthusiast myself I really enjoyed was it's obvious that Jason Reynolds knows and loves the Spider-Man Mythos, and the way that he blends it with Miles's preoccupations and the story was wonderful. I think he did a great job of making not just a Miles Morales story but a Spider-Man story.
I didn't really enjoy Miles's best friend and comic relief character Gankey. I found him to be quite juvenile, far more so than a 16-year-old would be. Like, he acted I think emotional maturity age of a middle schooler in a way that I think sort of pulled me out of the story a couple of times. He had his moments of some emotional depths but they were always replaced by, like, a funny oneliner or whatever and I didn't necessarily love that. He felt very much like a comic book comic relief character, there for just one or two panels, and I don't know that that necessarily translated to novel form in a way that I personally responded to. But nonetheless, Gankey was always in Miles's corner and it was really good to see a sort of healthy relationship between two young men like that.
I also thought that the introduction of poetry as a sort of form of self-expression and figuring out one's own identity was a little bit on the nose as a literary device, but I do think it was a valuable one regardless. It was a fun through line to follow as Miles sort of began to reckon with what he was and who he was and his position as a person with a relative amount of power compared to other people. I think it was a little bit on the nose but overall I think it was an effective way to that part of the story, but I sort of wish that it had been interwoven a little more organically, like Miles's crush on a poet at his school perhaps prompting him to write this poetry by himself rather than it being an assignment, that might have been, I think, a little bit more effective for me personally. I only mention this because it contrasts so heavily with a theme-exploration device that Reynolds used in another aspect of the story that I think was woven in beautifully and very organically so the contrast to me kind of stands out. The one that I think was done very, very well was Miles talking to the Black men of his community (including his father) and sort of exploring the ideas of anti-Blackness as an inherited and a shared trauma within his community. The Mystery of the story (which was incredibly easy to solve, but I don't think the point of it was that it was complicated ,so I'm giving it a big old pass there) but the point of it was it was a story that had happened over and over and over again: when the Black men around Miles were young, something happened in their lives--whether within the criminal justice system or within their educational systems or what have you--they were placed at a constant disadvantage or forced to react with anger after somebody kept poking and poking and poking at a bruise that ultimately led to their futures and their progress being derailed. And Miles is allowed, through these conversations, through this building of community, to sort of figure out that what's happening to him is part of a cycle that's been going on for decades (if not centuries) and find that strength within himself and use that anger in a way that benefits not just him but his community as a whole, and gives himself basically some Solid Ground to stand on to figure out what his identity is, whether or not he's Spider-Man, whether or not he's anything other than himself.
Overall, I think Jason Reynolds is a really talented writer if he writes more Spider-Man stuff, you know I'm going to be picking it up, just because I think he understands the, like, ethos and the pathos of this character in a way that really jives with my understanding of him as well.
One thing I really liked about Reynolds's book is that I think he writes children very honestly. The ways that Miles acts when he is at school with his friends, or getting really flustered and tongue tied around his crush, or having stage fright in terms of sharing poetry that he has written, all of that felt very honest and true to a teenage mindset and the preoccupations and priorities that a 16-year-old would have, whether or not they had superpowers. I also love that at no point (despite Miles having these superpowers) was there ever any question of him being a kid. When he's interacting with his mom and dad--despite them not being preternaturally gifted with speed and dexterity and, like, magical spiderwebs that shoot out of their wrists--when Miles feels scared and in trouble, they are who he turns to and they provide a source of comfort, and it's really good to see a kid so loved on page. And that was made all the more true by the contrasting examples that Jason Reynolds put all around Miles, of people who didn't have so close a relationship with their parents or didn't have one at all, and how those different familial structures, and a lack of or an overabundance of support, change the way that kids are enabled to thrive.
Another thing that as a Spider-Man Enthusiast myself I really enjoyed was it's obvious that Jason Reynolds knows and loves the Spider-Man Mythos, and the way that he blends it with Miles's preoccupations and the story was wonderful. I think he did a great job of making not just a Miles Morales story but a Spider-Man story.
I didn't really enjoy Miles's best friend and comic relief character Gankey. I found him to be quite juvenile, far more so than a 16-year-old would be. Like, he acted I think emotional maturity age of a middle schooler in a way that I think sort of pulled me out of the story a couple of times. He had his moments of some emotional depths but they were always replaced by, like, a funny oneliner or whatever and I didn't necessarily love that. He felt very much like a comic book comic relief character, there for just one or two panels, and I don't know that that necessarily translated to novel form in a way that I personally responded to. But nonetheless, Gankey was always in Miles's corner and it was really good to see a sort of healthy relationship between two young men like that.
I also thought that the introduction of poetry as a sort of form of self-expression and figuring out one's own identity was a little bit on the nose as a literary device, but I do think it was a valuable one regardless. It was a fun through line to follow as Miles sort of began to reckon with what he was and who he was and his position as a person with a relative amount of power compared to other people. I think it was a little bit on the nose but overall I think it was an effective way to that part of the story, but I sort of wish that it had been interwoven a little more organically, like Miles's crush on a poet at his school perhaps prompting him to write this poetry by himself rather than it being an assignment, that might have been, I think, a little bit more effective for me personally. I only mention this because it contrasts so heavily with a theme-exploration device that Reynolds used in another aspect of the story that I think was woven in beautifully and very organically so the contrast to me kind of stands out. The one that I think was done very, very well was Miles talking to the Black men of his community (including his father) and sort of exploring the ideas of anti-Blackness as an inherited and a shared trauma within his community. The Mystery of the story (which was incredibly easy to solve, but I don't think the point of it was that it was complicated ,so I'm giving it a big old pass there) but the point of it was it was a story that had happened over and over and over again: when the Black men around Miles were young, something happened in their lives--whether within the criminal justice system or within their educational systems or what have you--they were placed at a constant disadvantage or forced to react with anger after somebody kept poking and poking and poking at a bruise that ultimately led to their futures and their progress being derailed. And Miles is allowed, through these conversations, through this building of community, to sort of figure out that what's happening to him is part of a cycle that's been going on for decades (if not centuries) and find that strength within himself and use that anger in a way that benefits not just him but his community as a whole, and gives himself basically some Solid Ground to stand on to figure out what his identity is, whether or not he's Spider-Man, whether or not he's anything other than himself.
Overall, I think Jason Reynolds is a really talented writer if he writes more Spider-Man stuff, you know I'm going to be picking it up, just because I think he understands the, like, ethos and the pathos of this character in a way that really jives with my understanding of him as well.