Jonathan Tibbs is a normal 22-year-old kid who suddenly becomes Earth's protector when an alien implants a device in his chest that allows him to have enhanced abilities to battle alien monsters from another planet when they come looking for challengers. But the device can only work with what it's got, so Jonathan embarks on a mission to turn himself into a living weapon by... working out at the gym... and getting really into workout supplements... and becoming an expert hand-to-hand and bo staff fighter in a matter of weeks.

Readers who aren't all that particular about their superhero origin stories, and who don't mind getting strung along for an entire book only to have the really interesting stuff teased at the very end as coming in future books.

Pretty much everything. The pacing and narrative were poor, the character development was lacking, and the things the author chose to spend his time going into great detail on were tangential to the plot at best.

Move on to something else and not even consider reading the next book in this series.

It's a pretty poor excuse for a superhero origin story, and an even worse series starter. It's entirely geared toward teasing you to read on to the next book at the very end, and it doesn't stand on its own as a particularly interesting or exciting story.

I had a lot of issues with this book, almost all of which can be boiled down to the simple fact that nothing much happens. Between the inciting incident early on where the protagonist gets special powers and wins a fight with a monster by sheer luck, and the very end of the book where the protagonist finds out what's really going on, the middle 80% of the book is little more than an extended training montage and filler while the protagonist waits for another monster to show up and do battle.

The filler isn't my particular cup of tea either; characters talking about meaningless things (comic book versus religion debate, film trivia, etc.) that don't move the story forward and just take up space. There's an incredible amount of detail about the nature of the protagonist's training regimen as he prepares for another monster attack, but very little in the way of character development, and every time the protagonist meets the mysterious person who gave him his powers, the conversations are all "I can't tell you that now" for no good reason except that the info would be a spoiler for the end of the book tease into the rest of the series.

Overall, this book was my least favorite version of a series starter, which is that nothing really happens because it's entirely geared toward dropping some information and teasing what's going to come in future books at the very end. I prefer series starters that stand on their own, or at least develop a bunch of intriguing possibilities for the other books in the series and this one accomplished neither of those things. I was pretty disappointed in this book after being really excited about the blurb, and I don't plan on reading further in the series.

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Created Mar 15, 2020 at 12:16am • Submit your own review...