Heroine Complex, Sarah Kuhn – Book Review

Hello humans! Today’s review is for a book that was graciously lent to me by Asha at A Cat, A Book, and a Cup of Tea. Heroine Complex is a book I had never heard of before she mentioned it and I am so grateful to have had the chance to read it! Asha talked about this book here on the blog before when we discussed Marissa Meyer’s Renegades so you should go check that post out for a bit more superhero goodness!

Goodreads Summary:

Being a superheroine is hard. Working for one is even harder.

Evie Tanaka is the put-upon personal assistant to Aveda Jupiter, her childhood best friend and San Francisco’s most beloved superheroine. She’s great at her job—blending into the background, handling her boss’s epic diva tantrums, and getting demon blood out of leather pants.

Unfortunately, she’s not nearly as together when it comes to running her own life, standing up for herself, or raising her tempestuous teenage sister, Bea.

But everything changes when Evie’s forced to pose as her glamorous boss for one night, and her darkest secret comes out: she has powers, too. Now it’s up to her to contend with murderous cupcakes, nosy gossip bloggers, and supernatural karaoke battles—all while juggling unexpected romance and Aveda’s increasingly outrageous demands. And when a larger threat emerges, Evie must finally take charge and become a superheroine in her own right… or see her city fall to a full-on demonic invasion.

Find Heroine Complex on Goodreads | Amazon UK (Affiliate)

This is a wonderfully silly, light-hearted and lovely superhero story. There were examples of pretty much everything I love to read: female friendships, not overpowering romance, superpowers, cake, demons and more. What I loved was that this book could have chosen to be very…what’s the word…worthy? It could have taken these themes of self-empowerment, of belonging, of managing your powers and such and been high and mighty about it. Instead, it lets those themes speak for themselves while at the same time having a huge amount of fun. This is the kind of superhero book I like to read.

I feel like, because superheroes are the technicolour characters that had to punch out of the covers of comic books to be noticed, they, therefore, had to have a sense of the ridiculous about them, they had to have that humour and that energy and lightness to them to keep themselves going. That’s not to suggest that there aren’t gritty hard-hitting comic books (in fact the opposite is true) but one only has to look at some of the ridiculous villains brought into the foreground in the Lego Batman movie to see how superheroes have always had this lightness at their heart. That wholesomeness is what this book captured for me, it was fun to read from beginning to end. It starts with demonic cupcakes – need I say more?

I liked that this book did the unexpected at times. It would have been an easy narrative to simply pit Aveda and Evie against one another, the slightly shy girl vs the diva has proved to work many times before. However, appropriately for the title of this book, things are a bit more complex than that. Details such as the way in which their friendship is built up, challenged, and developed are part of what lifts this book to be more than just a fluffy story about demonic cupcakes (not a sentence I anticipated writing if I’m honest).

This book is excellent, what more can I say? I may have to beg Asha for the next books in this series – or treat myself!

My rating: 4/5 stars

All opinions are my own.

What say you? Which Superhero stories are your favourites? Let me know in the comments below!

J