Not Your Sidekick

Sidekick Squad Series, Book 1

By: C.B. Lee

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Welcome to Andover...

where superpowers are common, but internships are complicated.

Just ask high school nobody, Jessica Tran. Despite her heroic lineage, Jess is resigned to a life without superpowers and is merely looking to beef-up her college applications when she stumbles upon the perfect (paid!) internship only it turns out to be for the town's most heinous supervillain.

On the upside, she gets to work with her longtime secret crush, Abby, who Jess thinks may have a secret of her own. Then there's the budding attraction to her fellow intern, the mysterious "M", who never seems to be in the same place as Abby. But what starts as a fun way to spite her superhero parents takes a sudden and dangerous turn when she uncovers a plot larger than heroes and villains altogether.

©2016 C.B. Lee (P)2018 Tantor

Great story

It was an amazing story,I loved it. I listened to it multiple times. it has a lot of romance at the end.

Slow start, exciting middle, lackluster ending

Slow to get going, then very exciting and fun, then a somewhat lackluster ending
This book took a while to get going. I almost gave up on it. I listened to the audiobook. The narrator is new to me and very good. I can't judge the writing from an audiobook, but I didn't hear any real problems. I liked all the main and supporting characters. The book is quirky and predictable, but would be good for young readers. For this type of book, the predictability made sense. The middle of the book is very exciting. I wasn't really expecting what happened, on many levels. The ending was disappointing in that nothing is really resolved. People are still missing and nothing really got changed, although it helped that some characters got wise to what was going on. I'm not going to read book two, since it's about a boy, and I really only read sapphic books. And sadly, I might have read book two anyway if the story was compelling enough, but it just wasn't.

Great concept, ending was...okay

Overall, I really liked this book. I loved how it served all sorts of representation without feeling forced at all. I enjoyed the world building, and the way the world grew up around me.
The only reason this isn't a five star review, is the ending.
tbh, it feels like this book just sort of...stops. Nothing is resolved, and I feel like even though Bells has his own story, Jess' story deserved a better conclusion.

I love this so much!

OK, so this book is written for teens. But I must say even as an adult I really love it. The imaginative backgrounds. The story arc the LGBT and Bi PoC representation, without being one dimensional about it. Is all fantastic very much worth a read.

Plot's predictable - til it twists! Fun & original

I enjoyed the first few chapters of the novel while feeling like I knew exactly where it was headed (the secret identities of some of the superpowered characters, for instance, can be seen a mile away)......but then, gradually, the plot steered itself in directions I had no idea were coming! A cute but simple but cute story suddenly became much more complex and interesting. The common-to-fiction powers of flight and super-strength, for instance, are joined by a couple powers I've never seen in superpower fiction. Characters who seemed straightforward reveal new layers. And the whole premise of supervillain vs. superhero battles being consumed as entertainment, which is interesting in its own right, becomes even more fascinating as more facts about those battles are revealed.
This novel a fun read (/listen) all the way through, but it also ends up exploring serious themes like racism, media consumption, what counts as criminal behavior, and government control.