Not Your Villain

Sidekick Squad Series, Book 2

By: C. B. Lee

Narrated by: JD Jackson

Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Just plain fun!

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!

I loved the first book, but...

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!

Not your villain

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

Skip part 1

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.

Improvement Over First Book

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.

disappointing follow-up in a fun series

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.

Weaker than the first

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.

Show don't tell.

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.