PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 30 or Seven Wondering WTF Is Going On?

For a book with a number in the title, I chose Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher. I saw it sitting on my friend’s shelf and thought it looked like fun. Everybody’s gotta be wrong sometimes.

From the cover and general description, the premise is great. The last troupe of superheroes, the final supervillain, and one ordinary citizen who just became super himself. I expect Tony to be the main POV character but we don’t really spend that much time with him overall, and that was a huge problem.

Christopher was trying to tell too many stories: Tony, Blackbird, the Cowl, Sam & Joe, the Seven Wonders, and a few others. Because there were so many different narratives going on, none of them were very deep. We weren’t able to go deep enough into Aurora, Dragon Star, or Cowl’s mind to get a good picture of them as characters or find out what they know. It also disrupted the narrative flow to jump from character to character. We’re following the cops and now we’re switching to Tony and now we’re switching to the police chief.

What was almost as distracting as the ricocheting narrative? Never know anything! I was able to make some educated guesses in the beginning but toward the end it got more and more convoluted. I’m dealing with issues from a dozen characters and nobody can know what the hell is going on at any point in time? I wonder if this is how amnesiac characters on soap operas are supposed to feel.

By the final 100 pages, I was only still reading because I wanted to see what would happen with the plot. I wanted to see if, by some dues ex machine of epic proportions, this could be tied together. If 90% of the remaining characters died, I was fine with that since I had no investment in any of them.

Austin Grossman did a much better job of telling a superhero story with Soon I Will Be Invincible. There were 2 POV characters and it worked pretty well. Christopher was trying to do all the subplots of Game of Thrones with none of the depth and it didn’t work. Mildly entertaining but not worth the amount of time I wound up putting into this book.