Rating: 2,5/5 Stars
Jess often feels as if she’s not Chinese enough in certain situations and not Vietnamese enough in others. It’s awkward when you’re not quite one but not quite the other.
I feel like I was too old to read this book, or perhaps it was my lovely cynical self that simply prevented me from enjoying this story? Regardless, the thing is although Not Your Sidekick presented interesting family relationships, strong friendships, wonderful representations of LGBTIQA and POC characters, the story itself was extremely predictable, clichéd and with severely underdeveloped world-building.
That’s why I feel that this book was not for me. It’s not bad or anything, but it didn’t have many elements that I enjoyed other than representation and cute relationships.
The world-building wasn’t so great. This is a place with superheroes and supervillains. After a third world war, people began developing super powers and are now organized to fight crime, each hero is classified based on their powers (some people can fly, which is rare, but others can change their nail colors and that’s not a power good enough to be considered “super”) and how long they can do it without needing to recharge.
Jess is the only average one in a family of superheroes. Her mom and dad are respected in their community (although, technically their alter egos are, since they have to keep secret identities for safety), Jess’ older sister is a respected new hero fighting alongside Captain Orion, and her little brother is a genius. With that family, Jess is expected to be something and yet she is just a regular girl.
The world is all about heroes and villains fighting for different causes, just as you have heroes you have their “evil” counterpart but I found that lacking. You see these “super” people go to the same school and it’s there where they are assigned their roles; some are told to be heroes, others villains. There’s no real fight there, it’s just a matter of performing roles for unknown reasons that didn’t make much sense.
Why should I be invested in this when there’s no real problem here? At the end of the book, the story tries to make some sort of big stand against evil but it makes no sense and could be fixed easily.
The characters were all right, I like Jess and how she tried to find her place in the world when she felt so out of place, but sometimes the girl complained too much about EVERYTHING. You had her family, her school, her friends, her non-existing-powers, her car, the weather. The list could go on and on, at a certain point I went from understanding her to being mildly annoyed by her. Look, I like complaining, it’s pretty much my life style, but someone who complains ALL the time will eventually tire you, and that’s what happens here.
As for the romance, sure it was cute, but it kind of went from zero to fifty in one go and I wasn’t as invested on it as I would like.
The friendships however, were pretty awesome, I would like to see more of that!
Something that was weird to me, was to see how people reacted to Jess’ sexuality. Apparently she once accidentally outed herself as a bisexual through a poem (how I don’t get) and everybody at school acted weird, throwing glances at her and whispering behind her back. I don’t know, I found it unusual since this is the future we are talking about and we had a greatly diverse cast who (as far as I could see) had never been seen differently for who they were, I didn’t quite get why bisexuality would be deemed as something weird.
Lastly, the book was really predictable and when I mean predictable I mean… really predictable. At page ten or so I knew pretty much how the story would go and what was the deal with the bad guys and all. That’s why I said I found this book rather childish in its execution, it’s probably what I would have enjoyed when I was 10 or so, but not now as a 22 year-old woman.
In the end, Not Your Sidekick is a book with a wonderfully diverse cast and cool friendships but that just wasn’t my taste.
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