SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen: https://t.co/Z89DPHeiCl

Short Review: 7 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 22, 2021

Short Review (cont): She's a superhero w/super strength. He's a bank robber who can read and erase people's memories. What they have in common though is neither can remember anything before 2 years ago...a mystery that will bring them together. Fun, but very unexceptional
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) March 22, 2021

We Could Be Heroes is a new scifi, well superhero-based, novel by author Mike Chen.  Chen is the author for a book I actually DNFed - the time travel novel Here and Now and Then - but that was as much about the format I was reading that book in (audiobook) as the writing, so I was always very interested in giving him another shot.  And so with this new release, a rather short novel, I figured now was a good time to give that a try.  

And well....We Could Be Heroes is fun, but honestly, it's too short to really make any lasting impression.  There's nothing wrong with short books in general, but short books naturally have less time to build up their characters and to make us care about them for reasons beyond simply being the protagonists/antagonists/whatever, and We Could Be Heroes really could've used the extra time to pull that off.  It's still a fun adventure of a pair of amnesiacs, one of whom has become a superhero and the other of whom has become a supervillain, who meet up and wind up trying to figure out what happened to them - but without the extra page-span, there wasn't enough here to get me really caring about what was going on. 



--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Two years ago, Jamie and Zoe woke up with no memories in strange apartments leased out by a mysterious company, along with a few notes lying around providing clues to their identities. Those clues tip off both to the fact they each have superpowers - Jamie can read people's memories and erase them while Zoe has super strength, hovering, and possibly more - but the two resolve to use them very differently.  For Jamie, an overheard conversation leads him to using his powers for bank robbing - never harming anyone, always removing all memories of him from anyone watching, and always taking just enough that the bank's insurance will cover it - so that he can have enough money for him and his cat to get away.  For Zoe, her powers lead her towards superheroics, tracking down muggers and the like, and making a name for herself.  

Where the two differ especially though is in their approach to their mysterious pasts, as Jamie would rather move forward than find out while Zoe is desperate to confirm her own identity.  But when the two cross paths at an amnesiacs support group, they find themselves brought together on a path to try and figure out what really happened to them. Yet as the two grow as friends, they discover that their shared forgotten pasts hide a dangerous enemy, one who has plans for the two of them...as well as everyone else in the city....
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We Could Be Heroes alternates telling its story between Zoe and Jamie's third person perspectives, sometimes within the same chapter.  It's a book that moves incredibly quickly, largely to its detriment (more on that below), with our main characters showing who they are in the first four chapters through one bank heist by Jamie that Zoe fails to stop, and then meeting up in literally the fifth chapter out of forty-five chapters, with the two remaining essentially a team from thereon out.  This is a story with a plot that it wants to get to and is in a hurry to get to it before it runs out of pages so you will never feel like things are going too slowly here.  

And both our main characters, and the plot itself, are fairly enjoyable and likable.  Jamie isn't that interested in his mysterious past (although he's more interested than he'd ever admit) but just wants to make enough money in as harmless a way as possible with his powers to take himself and his cat to somewhere enjoyable.  Zoe by contrast wants to help people with her powers but also to figure out how she got this way, and finding out whom she is is a driving force for her.  The two have decent chemistry when they meet together and quickly form a bond that's very believable in a purely platonic fashion.* And the plot generally works well to give them both things to do with their powers, an adventure to have, and troubles that are believable and enjoyable to see the two of them overcome as they figure out what's really going on.  

*In a nice change from the usual novel like this, there's no romance between our opposite-gendered protagonists in this novel as I've come to expect.  I like romance a lot, but there's no need for it everywhere and it would've felt shoed in here.*

But again, this book is so short, and everything is too quick, that none of what happens, and none of what the characters feel and experience ever becomes particularly memorable....or even made me really care too much about what happened to them.  The characters may have been amnesiac for two years prior to the start of the story and operating on their own during that time...but we see them for practically two seconds before they come together and start figuring things out, so we never really see what life was like for them during that period or what made them what they are.  And that's part of what this book is trying to sell - a superhero and supervillain without memories of their pasts....who we basically never get to see do much superheroing or supervillaining at all! 

Similarly, revelations as to their pasts come fast and furious and the book never really takes time to breathe to allow the characters to struggle through what those revelations mean.  I mean for example, I was happy the book avoided the trope of one character discovering something and then hiding it from the other only for it to come out at the worst possible time, instead featuring the other character discovering it at a moment they had the context to understand it...but this also served as a character beat that was thus quickly pushed aside as inconvenient for the plot.  

Again the plot is fun and the characters are enjoyable, and I never really wanted to put this book down because there's absolutely no drag.  But the speed and shortness of it all also made me not really that interested in recommending it to others or even in seeing a sequel as one is possibly teased at times, which is a shame.