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I had no real idea of what to expect with this book. When a group of friends picked it for a buddy read I decided to take a walk down the sci-fi aisle, a place where I don’t spend much time. Plus, as someone who leveraged her back-door access to a SQL database into providing the small company she worked for with a wealth of information about their own operation that they wouldn’t otherwise have had, I was intrigued by the reference to “weaponized data��.

Given that intro you may understand that it took me a while to process the fact that I was reading a book where normal office workers interact with superheroes and supervillains. I had already begun to get a positive feeling for the main character, Anna, who seemed so rooted in a typical 21st century reality, when I realized what all the “hench�� business was about.

It’s fair to say that my appreciation for Anna’s situation carried over through the rest of the book. I think I saw her as a normal person, from a normal world, trying to find her way in a world of super-people. They had always been a presence in her life, just as they had in everyone else’s life, and she may have been aware that their way of interacting with each other did not represent normal human behavior. But when a series of events lands her in the middle of their world, she is put in a position of finding out how far she can go in that world to avenge the harm that’s been done to her.

A lot of Anna’s behaviors are pretty despicable, but I guess I always felt they were attuned to that superhero environment, and not to her older reality. I tend to think she would have acted differently, had a different life, made different decisions - if not for the superhero encounter that turned her old world on its head.