Renegades
Marissa Meyer
Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been binge watching My Hero Academia, but my initial impression of Marissa Meyer’s Renegades was that it was going to be the book version of what I already loved, and that gave me pause. Would it be original enough? Would I want to do the harder work of visualizing what’s usually a comic/animations (and for good reason)? Would the plot move enough for such a big book instead of taking its meandering, descriptive time?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Nova Artino has a secret identity as Nightmare, the villain who’s on the run after almost killing the #1 hero in Gatlon City the world. With her plan foiled by a new multi-powered prodigy calling themselves The Sentinel, life as she knows it going up in smoke. Nova wants to return to her life as an Anarchist, a group labelled as villains by the ruling hero syndicate the Renegades, but that life is slowly crumbling too.
After her family was murdered at the age of six, Nova was taken in by her uncle… Ace Anarchy- the man who changed the world for prodigies by destroying the government and societies that oppressed them. Steeped in his ideals and raised by his comrades after the Renegades killed him, Nova hates the Renegades more than anything. When a chance comes for her to exact vengeance on them, Nova must make the choice to temporarily compromise her morals for the greater good of the cause she believes in. The closer she comes to achieving her goal, the closer she finds herself to her new team captain Adrian, who believes justice… and in Nova.
I wasn’t prepared to like Nova as much as I did, but I love her. She’s keenly smart, and determined to use her position to help the Anarchists. Nova lends a succinct and caustic worldview to a city and government that’s trying to be black and white. Her internal conflicts by “becoming” a Renegade (even if it’s so she can spy on them) keep her narrative engaging.
Nova’s criticisms of the society the Renegades are trying to build are valid, which I found most surprising. In some ways, her views are moderate and common sense, like saying non-prodigy citizens should be able to be heroes, and in others they are a little extreme, like saying she wishes prodigies didn’t exist, but they always come back to her core ideals of self-sufficiency and independence. While she doesn’t temper her views much, she does expose proverbial chinks in the armor of what the Renegades are trying to build.
It was a relief, after watching and enjoying the plot of My Hero Academia so far, to see someone else finding a way to interpret how heroes aren’t intrinsically good. They have flaws in their ideology, the same as other people. What I found to be most original was how I got to read things from a “villain’s” perspective. Meyer capitalizes on that throughout her novel. Which was a tome… but it had to be.
“Superheroes” is a topic that lends itself to a visual medium like comics/manga or animation. It’s often easier to illustrate what a hero or villain’s power is, rather than writing it out. Meyer tackled that problem head-on, which definitely added to the length of the book with her well-executed action sequences. Given Meyer’s experience with writing science-fiction, she was more than up to the task of creating a superhero story into a written medium.
There are some ways that writing these types of stories adds extra character depth than you’d typically get when reading a comic. Told in alternating points of view between Adrian and Nova, there are three arcs coiling around each which weave the main plot, and Meyer does an excellent job of keeping the pace moving while adding Adrian and Nova’s thoughts and feelings into everything.
At times I wished that the side characters felt a little more important than scenery to the story. Especially the other members of the Renegade team Nova joins: Smokescreen, Monarch, and Red Assassin. While they’re part of the story, they don’t seem to add anything to it. Most of the plot involves characters duping them into ignorance which is a shame, and I hope that in the sequel there is fallout over the lies they’ve been told a la Netflix’s Daredevil Season 2.
Overall, this is a book that you can take your time with while reading to savor all the interactions, whereas a superhero comic often demands rereading because of how quickly they can be taken in. There is also greater opportunity for character development in future novels that I hope is taken advantage of by the author. This is great for someone who likes superheroes, but wants something with a little more to sink their teeth into for reading. Additionally, fans of My Hero Academia who are not averse to trying something in a written medium will enjoy it as well.
The Little Book Witch 
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