Secondhand Origin Stories by Lee Blauersouth
Opal has been planning to go to Chicago and join the Midwest’s superhero team, the Sentinels, since she was a little kid. That dream took on a more urgent tone when her superpowered dad was unjustly arrested for protecting a neighbor from an abusive situation. Now, she wants to be a superhero not only to protect people, but to get a platform to tell the world about the injustices of the Altered Persons Bureau, the government agency for everything relating to superpowers.
But just after Opal’s high school graduation, a supervillain with a jet and unclear motives attacks the downtown home of the Sentinels, and when Opal arrives, she finds a family on the brink of breaking apart. She meets a boy who’s been developing secret (and illegal) brain-altering nanites right under the Sentinel’s noses, another teenage superhero-hopeful who looks suspiciously like a long-dead supervillain, and the completely un-superpowered daughter of the Sentinels’ leader. Can four teens on the fringes of the superhero world handle the corruption, danger, and family secrets they’ve unearthed?
Representation Includes
- Deaf asexual male POV character
- Nonbinary (genderfluid? I found a few reviews that say this, but I’m not 100% confident that it’s the correct label) bisexual POV character
- Two sapphic POV characters, one of whom is black
Content Warnings
Ableism (challenged), racism (challenged), misgendering (challenged).Reviews
- Alexa’s review
- Claudie Arseneault’s review
- Reviews by black readers needed
- Reviews by deaf readers needed
Details
- Published 2018 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
- Paperback (ISBN13: 9781978397811)