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After book #4, I had pretty low expectations for this one. But it turned out to be really, really good. I loved it.

In this book, Astra & co go (uninvited) to Japan. Japan's method of dealing with supers is very different from the US, and more than a little affected by manga & anime. All supers are required to required to register with the government and undergo training, and all superhero teams are sponsored by the government. Anyone who doesn't register is called a ronin, and can be arrested on sight. Both heroes and ronin have fan clubs that gleefully dissect every scrap of news media about them, must like like modern idol groups.

(All this isn't just because the goverment feels like it -- the country is regularly besieged by kaiju and other threats. It needs a strong, coordinated defense.)

But Hope's life seems to depend on finding someone who seems to be hiding in Japan, so after a conversation that Never Happened with a high-ranking US government official she decides to infiltrate Japan. Of course her closest friends insist on coming with her, and the team "mislays" some very useful resources in her direction.

While in Japan, then help. They make up secret ronin identities, and when they run across a problem they do what they can to help. It just... feels good? Feels lighter than the other books? There's no angry protests against supers, or demagogues stirring up hate. There's no wondering if friends are secretly traitors. There's no impossible crush to angst over. There is, however, much fun with Japanese idol culture.

Overall it just feels like a good, hopeful superhero story, and when it's over, it's done. Officially the Japanese government has no idea who these Three Remarkable Ronin were, though clearly they perished in valiantly defending the country and so their memory should be honored. And also clearly these three lost American tourists should be returned home with no fuss.

This is book #4 in the series, but it's not the fourth part. Apparently there's a short story, "Omega Night", and it contained both plot and character developments that significantly impact this book. However, even on the official author's website it's not listed between books 3 and 4. It's listed after the final book, among other "related works".

And the author doesn't really do a good job of recapping what happened, it's just an abrupt jump, and now Hope/Astra's angsting over a new crush that started during that book, freaking out over a danger to one of her friends that's due to events in that book, and a number of other sudden changes.

And these changes continue to casually come up over the course of the entire book, so that put a serious damper on my enjoyment of it.

Beyond that, the premise/setting was unique and somewhat interesting, but a lot of it felt like repeating "same song, different verse." Just marking things off a checklist. Astra has a crush that she doesn't want to act on (thankfully not the same one as at the end of book #3). Astra asks for advice, then ignores it in a way that could cause trouble for the one who gave it. Astra manages to get separated from her team (but thankfully not abducted this time). Astra makes mistakes and spends time berating herself. Important rules get massively broken but a loophole means it's okay. And the Perfect Defenses get destroyed via the most plausible method, which somehow no-one saw coming.

I did really like that, after introducing a terrifying Islamic terrorist supervillain in book #1, the author chose to introduce a character that showcases the more peaceful side of Islam. I wish the character was ongoing, but it doesn't look like he will be.

I really didn't like the friend drama for this book - it felt pretty contrived, but Astra was utterly poleaxed. Honestly, the number of times something relatively trivial knocks Astra so off her stride that she can't think straight for several days should probably be cause for serious concern among the team leadership.

This is the third book in the Wearing the Cape series, and I quite enjoyed it.

Unlike the first two books, this one have multiple narrators, changing each chapter. It does say in the header of the chapter who's narrating, but it took me a long, somewhat confusing time to notice that.

Each of the three narrators does have a fairly distinct voice, which I appreciated once I knew them well enough to recognize them. By the end of the book I honestly liked Grendel a lot better than Hope/Astra. I think perhaps Megaton was at least partially an attempt to recapture the innocence of the new-to-superpowers-and-super-heroing that Hope had in the first book, but the circumstances were too radically different.

On the surface there are three main plots: 1 - Hope becomes the leader of her own "Young Sentinels" team. According the The Rules, because these kids are all under 18, they are strictly not allowed to be sent into combat.
2 - A forest is trying for a hostile takeover of all the city's airports 3 - Someone is going around killing people who attack superheroes, regardless of how dangerous the attack was.

I really, really liked most of the Young Sentinels team, and didn't dislike any of them. Grendel was a breath of fresh air, and Ozma is a delight both on her own and as a foil.

However, I had a number of issues with it, some of which are unique to this book and some of which only became issues in this book because of a cumulative effect from previous books.

On the cumulative side, in this book I really started to notice how frequently The Rules were strictly, absolutely enforced...except when it would be inconvenient or undramatic. Also, Astra apparently has a secret super power that allows her to fit an impossible and ever-increasing number of work-related activities into her day, and still spend time with her friends and family (although admittedly that's often cut short). And the anti-super demagogue is an increasingly present issue that doesn't look like he'll be going away. Plus it starts to feel like there's a checklist to mark off for each book.

But when I finished the book, my first words were, "Hope's annual crush had BETTER not come to anything because that is just super skeevy."

This book starts with Astra's hero reputation trashed because of tabloid rumors, and even her friends suggesting that since it's been months, maybe it's time to stop wearing mourning black. The police chief suddenly hates her for no obvious reason. Plus there's someone running for office whose platform is all fearmongering against all super-powered individuals, especially those who wear masks to preserve their civilian life, like Astra does.

In other words, that intense, heart-wringing grief at the end of book one? Time jump so the author doesn't have to actually follow up on it, which would be understandable if they wanted to return everything to normal, but we don't get to go back to the generally optimistic feel of the first book either.

That said, there's still a lot of funny conversations and narrator observations. They carried me through a plot that could be summarized as "the world has gone to pot, and also here: have a Chicago Mob war. With superpowers."

(I loved the "BTW we're lesbian lovers" scene so much I read the entire thing out loud to my spouse, and we were both laughing like crazy.)

Officially, Astra is still part of Chicago Sentinels hero team. But since she doesn't confide in them until she has to, and she does a lot of stuff without authorization, it's really more of a solo adventure with a couple of friends helping out. And she's constantly berating herself for not having planned thoroughly enough, and yet she still keeps on going off half-cocked. It's kind of tedious.

To start with, this book has a serious tragic ending, one that normally would make me just give up on the series. However, the rest of the book was good enough that I did keep reading.

I quite liked the main character, Hope Corrigan aka Astra. The story is told in first person from her point of view, and she's a generally positive person. She makes rookie mistakes, but her team, her family, and her friends all support her and encourage her. At the start her parents are understandably worried about her becoming a superhero since it's a dangerous profession, but admit that they raised her to take responsibility, and in this case that does mean doing whatever she can to help.

And she's not the only one making mistakes and improving -- her team does it too as they're called on to deal with types of events they've never trained for. In general it's actually a pretty relentlessly positive book, despite the high body count among the general populace. Some of that is independent of her, but some is directly due to her influence. For example, after a fight with her one hero realizes that he's gotten too dark & jaded, and tries to reclaim some of his youthful idealism. And after another fight, she convinces a bad guy to get some help for his problems. Independent of her, multiple supervillains pitch in to help however they can after a massive disaster, and at least one - the one she worked with, of course - winds up becoming a hero.

One nice thing about this series is that, while there's certainly plenty of super-powered fighting, the team is actually built around Crisis Aid & Intervention. They might (and do) subdue supervillains who are posing a danger to the populace, but once the bad guy is subdued it's someone in law enforcement who takes them away.

I liked the relatively slow build of the romance. It did escalate pretty abruptly towards the end of the book, but there were extremely valid reasons for emotions to be running high. The power differential bothered me a little (he was a full-fledged hero, she was still technically a sidekick), but she was the one making all the moves, and he was the one interjecting caution and common sense. The age gap did bother me since it exceeded the "age /2 + 7" skeeviness rule, but since there's emphatically no sex, and there was a catalyzing event, I was okay with it and willing to see where it went in the next book, once the adrenaline wore off.

But the ending... several important characters, people she's actively friends with and we've seen a lot of in the book, die. Completely dead, not coming back. The book ends with her grieving, and crying in the arms of her church's priest. (She's Catholic, it comes up regularly.)