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In Hero, author Perry Moore demonstrates a superpower of his own: he can turn prose into lead.

Since Moore's intentions are admirable, it's tempting to gloss over the book's poor execution by praising it using plenty of qualifiers. ("Hero is the best YA novel featuring a gay teen superhero I've read all month!") Unfortunately, I just can't bring myself to use the words "Hero" and "best" in the same sentence. Well, in a pinch I could probably force myself to say, "I read Hero while staying at a Best Western," but even that would be a lie.

Moore's writing fails on every level. It lacks any poetry or spark--there's no life to it. I've read screenplays where the stage directions were written with more flair. The characters are bitchy and unappealing. (Bitchy characters are fine as long as they are also appealing.) The dialogue is pedestrian. The structure of the story is flabby. Even the superhero names are awful: Dark Hero...Golden Boy...Right Wing...Velvet Vixen...Galaxy Guy. And no, I'm not making these up.

Moore has chosen to set his story in the DC Comics Universe. (For any non-geeks out there, DC is the company that publishes Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. If you don't know who those characters are, you're on your own.) It appears, however, that since Moore didn't own the rights to any of the DC characters, he avoided copyright infringement by making slight (extreeeemely slight) alterations to them. Presumably a lawyer advised him on precisely how much he needed to tweak each character in order to avoid getting sued. ("No, Perry, Sooperman is still too close to Superman. Ditto on Supermann. What's that? Uberman, you say? Eh, good enough. Do I get paid now?") I would have been fine with him satirizing established superhero characters, as the creators of and did, but Moore isn't making any sort of commentary on the original characters. He is simply ripping them off.

As I said earlier, Moore has admirable intentions. In mainstream comic books, on the rare occasions when gay characters have been depicted, well-meaning creators have unconsciously let their prejudices run wild. So, while it would never occur to them to show Spider-Man getting gang-raped, castrated, or impaled through the anus, give 'em a gay character and suddenly all of those storylines become strangely appealing. Moore published a list (click to see it) detailing the grisly fates of various gay superheroes. He says he wrote Hero as a corrective to this shabby treatment, and in that limited arena he succeeds.

If you're looking for a well-written YA novel about a gay teenager (albeit a non-superpowered one), I recommend Brent Hartinger's Geography Club.