However, villains – and this book is full of them – are more interesting and more challenging when they have nuance. The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you're not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself. Gr 9 Up—While many teenagers have a challenging time dealing with school and peer pressure, for 15-year-old Danny Tozer, life is a little more complicated.

Without nuance, the book sometimes reads less like a well-developed story and more like a Very Special Episode About How Transphobia Is Bad. Pure genius … I’m not exaggerating the potential of Priest’s Clockwork Century’ Paul Goat Allen, ‘Exceptional . Her father is in denial that his son is now his daughter, and has been verbally abusive toward Danny.Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. In the vein of Perry Moore's Hero, Dreadnought is an action-packed Young Adult debut novel of a trans superhero who must face off against a cyborg villain. Even for teens, growing up in the age of superhero movies means that this book probably isn’t offering anything new in terms of story other than Danny. Danielle must discover her place among the cities existing superheroes, deal with the consequences of her transition - especially from her transphobic family and friends. I can tolerate bad writing and meh plot if the characters are multi-dimentional but it definitely wasn’t the case here.

A diverse array of women drive the novel - from the white, gay and trans Danny, to the Latina Calamity, to Doc Impossible who is coded as non-white ( Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid) to Utopia who is - wait for it - a cyborg villain. Similarly, near the end of the book, Calamity and Dreadnought are sent to get some N2 or, as Calamity explains, non-Newtonian liquid.And then she goes to the Legion Tower, and without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Daniels manages to utterly devastate us. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those second hand superpowers transformed Danny's body into what she's always thought it should. I can appreciate how Daniels characterizes Danny not just as trans but a lesbian, and that her feelings for Sarah are a complicated mixture of admiration, awe, and attraction—but I’m also glad that Daniels resists the urge to make this anywhere near a straightforward romance. In an impressive debut, Daniels skillfully conveys Danielle’s pain, confusion, and emotional complexity as she faces a host of detractors and conflicts.

Dreadnought’s murderer―a cyborg named Utopia―still haunts the streets of New Port City, threatening destruction. Of course there are people who engage in long, nonsensical, discriminatory rants, but I think the character, and her impact on Danny, would have been more powerful if her objections had been more clearly connected to the story and if her character had more traits than just The Transphobic One. As nostalgia for the 1990s comes into its full bloom, she has become ever more convinced that she was born two or three years too late and missed all the good stuff the first time around.

hoping for another year of feeling more like myself, more reading, more writing, more art, more craft, more travel, more wholeness. For all books bought and read for Sapphic Readers Book Club, I will be hosting a giveaway for each book after I read it. Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she’s transgender.