Nobody fights the Epics...nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.
And David wants in. He wants Steelheart — the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David's father. For years, like the Reckoners, David's been studying, and planning — and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.
He's seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.
Rating: 4/5
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I am ashamed to say I’ve had Steelheart on my shelf since July and hadn’t once thought about reading it before Friday, when a storm hit and power went out, leaving me to reach out for the few paperbacks I have to entertain myself for the six hours the storm raged on.
In my defense, I bought not the English version but the translated one (I live in Argentina so obviously all the books that come here are translated), and I have had bad experiences with translations; not that they are terrible, but sometimes there are things that won’t wor in both languages, and that leaves the writing looking clunky.
There were a few instances when translation played against me, and I can’t say that the things that bothered me were really the book or just reading it in Spanish, but those things were few and it didn’t keep me from enjoying the rest of the novel.
Steelheart is a book about superheroes, or Epics as they are called; people who gained extraordinary abilities after a bright explosion, named Calamity, broke into the sky ten years ago. Ever since then, Epics have ruled and enacted chaos on the world, all trying to one up each other in a struggle for ultimate power and dominance.
Of all the epics, Steelheart is the most powerful. He is thought to be invinsible for he has no known weaknesses like the other Epics. Only David knows that’s not true, he saw Steelheart bleed when he was a kid, the day his father was killed at the hands of the Epic and he took control over the city of Chicago. Ever since then, David has dreamt of revenge and he knows that if he wants to defeat Steelheart he needs help. Everybody is too afraid to fight against Epics, if they do they are killed. Only the Reckoners are willing to stand against them and David has to join them if he wants to find the truth behind Steelheart’s weakness and destroy him.
I’ll admit, I found the main character a bit annoying at the beginning. His thirst for revenge and obsession crush on Megan, a Reckoner got tiresome pretty soon. He just seemed too perfect sometimes, the “good guy” in the novel and it was boring. It wasn’t until he actually started to fail and be part of the team, instead of simply trying to kill Steelheart, that began to warm up to him, this kid with an obsession with crappy metaphors and revenge.
The rest of the group was alright, although again, I had problems trying to remember which character was which at the beginning, they just seemed to blend together until their personalities started to come through.
I wasn’t fan of the “romance” if you could call it that, basically because David was an annoying kid who couldn’t understand why Megan wasn’t interested in him, so he kept pushing and pissing the poor girl off even more.
I loved the action and how fast-paced this book was. I wasn’t sure if I would be a fan of a book with superheroes (not because I have something against them, I’m just not crazy about them) but the twists and surprises the author put into the story made it incredibly entertaining and fun.
Now, that ending… was criminal. I can’t wait to read the next one in the series, Firefight!
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