Not Your Villain Audiobook By C. B. Lee cover art

Not Your Villain

Sidekick Squad Series, Book 2

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Not Your Villain

By: C. B. Lee
Narrated by: JD Jackson
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Bells Broussard thought he had it made when his superpowers manifested early. Being a shape-shifter is awesome. He can change his hair whenever he wants, and if putting on a binder for the day is too much, he's got it covered. But that was before he became the country's most wanted villain.

After discovering a massive cover-up by the Heroes' League of Heroes, Bells and his friends Jess, Emma, and Abby set off on a secret mission to find the Resistance.

Meanwhile, power-hungry former hero Captain Orion is on the loose with a dangerous serum that renders meta-humans powerless, and a new militarized robotic threat emerges. Everyone is in danger.

Between college applications and crushing on his best friend, will Bells have time to take down a corrupt government?

Sometimes, to do a hero's job, you need to be a villain.

©2017 C. B. Lee (P)2018 Tantor Fantasy Fiction LGBTQ+ Literature & Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Superhero
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I have really enjoyed this series so far! The audio narrators are wonderfully cast and I was engaged in the fun, upbeat storytelling from the beginning. If you’re looking for a lighthearted hero story that also deals with some big topics look no further. So so so excited that books like these exist for kids today. I wish I had books that talked about sexuality, pronouns, gender, etc. when I was a kid!

Just plain fun!

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Great story, don't love the narrator,and the story doesn't really have a ending, but it has a lot of romance.

Not your villain

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Skip the first part of the book, it is a retelling of the events but it does not add to the plot of the story. The rest of the events are interesting and keep you engaged.

Skip part 1

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I downloaded this before I even finished Not Your Sidekick, excited for the story continue. Therefore, I found the first part of the story incredibly slow. While I appreciate the need to narrate Bells' side of the story, a lot of it was repetition of the events of the first book. Additionally, the narration was distractingly poor, between the whiny valley-girl tones of female characters and the heinous mispronunciations of Asian names. I mean, seriously, Li-"Hoo-ah"?? The disrespect! For a book with such diversity and representation, this narrator sure didn't put any effort into an accurate portrayal. That being said, I loved the way this book continued its predecessor's way of presenting the teens as immature enough for their age, while completing the typical protagonist heroics. Happy as always to see a YA book so casual about diversity. I anxiously anticipate the third volume and hope it comes with a more appropriate narrator!

I loved the first book, but...

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While the performance is rather lacking as JD Jackson does a great job with all the voices that are non-female/her identifying voices (JD makes them all sound incredibly whiny and just more off than the person who read book 1. That person actually did pretty decent with the guy voices), the story and pacing of this book was much better. There were still places where I felt it was slow but then the pacing picked up around then. Some parts were still predictable but less so than the first one. Overall, this was a better told story and much more interesting than the first book, but I can still appreciate the first book as it set not only the tone but also set the world building up to the point that it needed to be at for this one.

I do plan on either buying the physical copy or the audio book once the third book in the series is available.

Improvement Over First Book

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I wanted tl like this one a ton. One of the most interesting and fun supporting characters from 'not your sidekick' takes center stage, but the book can't tell how much it wants to be recap of the first (about a third of it?) and how much to advance the narrative (not much). very much a story told at you, with lots of frustrating teen moments and foolish protagonist bits to advance the plot, not much of the cleverness and fun we got from the first entry. hoping it finds its feet again.

disappointing follow-up in a fun series

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This book is weaker than the first in every aspect.

The characters are all flat and unmemorable. Even those who were introduced in the first book are flatter and weaker in this iteration.

I was shocked by how poorly written the plot was. The beginning starts with a rushed recount of the first book from another character's perspective before flowing into the actual story. Unfortunately the story was no better after this point, with constant jumps in time, nonsensical choices by the characters, and an overall story that didn't make much sense. The entire plot feels like it was written by someone else, or the author only submitted the outline for what would eventually become book two in the series.

One interesting part of this series that bears mentioning is how the author handles gender and sexuality throughout the beginning. Any labels that might be used to define characters in other books are merely mentioned in passing being no more important than someone's hair colour which I quite enjoyed. Unfortunately the author seemed to run with this to the point that almost every single character fell in this group and it really just ruined the whole idea.

In the end I was so disappointed with this book after the cute story of the first one that I will certainly not be continuing the series.

Weaker than the first

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The author needs to learn to do more than just meanderingly describe what happened or will happen plotwise from a distance. Her best writing is in the character interactions but everything else falls flat here. The story felt very disjointed. most of the conflict remained unresolved at the end. Worse than the previous book in the series and that one wasn't too much to praise.

I wanted to like it too. Trans protagonist and all. but it's just not very good.

Show don't tell.

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This book feels like the result of so many things going wrong. The first book ended in a way that felt like it was going to be the albatross around this book's neck. That's not true. It isn't THE albatross, it is just AN albatross. There are so many problems here that the first one becomes almost lost in the crowd. The story seems to have no structure, fumbling anything that could be a dramatic turn and leaving it with no consequences. The political intrigue from the first book is utterly ignored, and while the romance in the first book was cure, this one takes up equal time but is utterly uninteresting. The antagonists seem utterly passive and incapable, leaving no sense of danger to anything that happens. To top it all off, the story does start to move better towards the end, but it is left with the same 'and everything worked out and went back to normal' ending that didn't work the first time. Maybe some of this could have worked better with more elegant writing, but everything is spelled out like the reader has no idea how the world works.
J.D. Jackson might be the biggest problem of all. I'm not the biggest fan of the first narrator, but he is so much worse. He reads this like it is a grocery list and can't pronounce a single non-English word (I get that some can be hard, but horchata? Seriously?) He even manages to mess up some English words,referring to Smasher and Shockwave as Shocker and Smashwave.

So poor...

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