All Of My Friends Are Superheroes
First and foremost All Of My Friends Are Superheroes is a really great idea, the Amazon synopsis reads thus :
"All Tom's friends really are superheroes. Tom even married
a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding the Perfectionist
is hypnotized by her ex, Hypno, to believe that Tom is invisible.
Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, the
Perfectionist is sure that Tom has abandoned her, so she's moving to
Vancouver. She'll use her superpowers to leave all the heartbreak
behind. With no idea that Tom's beside her, she boards the plane. Tom
has, until they touch down, to convince her he's there, or he loses her
forever."
So I was kind of excited by this. I really like superheroes, I really like a good love story. I guess I had high expectations, and these expectations were not really met.
It isn't badly written by any means, the style is really engaging and I was never really bored, yet I found I got annoyed by the descriptions of the Superheroes themselves. In a well worn theme throughout a character is introduced and their superpower described, and then we never see them again. The problem here really is that most of these superheroes have no real superpower at all and all that Kaufman is really describing is a personality. All The Perfectionist really is is a Type A Personality, there are others such as the Couch Potato which are similarly just descriptions of types of people with nothing really special there at all. Off hand, I can only think of Hypno as a character possessing genuine ability.
The real flaw here ultimately is the fact that this novel took me 30 minutes to read, possibly slightly less, and I kind of felt like : "Is this it?" I was really, really glad that I got it as a Kindle Daily Deal for £1.99 because if I'd paid list price I'd have felt properly ripped off by it.
It's very slight, has no depth, and feels like an excellent premise gone to waste. It's quite sweet, in its way, but wholly unsatisfying.
5/10
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