I Did Not Give that Spider Superhuman Intelligence (Please Don't Tell My Parents #0.5) by Richard Roberts

Goodnight is being pulled back into superheroing, despite being officially retired.

But when pint-sized heroes Mish-Mosh and Psychopomp drop in her lap, along with an instant chance to save the day, how could she not form Team Tiny?! A superhero team wedded to Goodnight’s firm principle

Being a superhero should be fun! To Irene this is an awesome game. Lives are at stake, some terrible people need stopping – but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fun as well!

I love the quirky super hero world which we’ve seen through the lens of Penny Ack and her friends which has always been so much zany fun. And after three books of that, this book is perfect to delve a little behind all that

And lo we have this prequel which does this so perfectly

Going back several decades before Penny came on the scene we get to see the wonderful origin stories of several of the most compelling characters that loom large over the ongoing series. Not characters who are, perhaps, most involved in the books, but ones whose legends truly shape them by everyone knowing about them – like Mourning Dove. One of the good elements of the original three books is that there isn’t a lot of explanation of things that everyone knows- everyone knows about Mourning Dove so there isn’t really any need to explain her other than have her presence shadow the book. That’s well done. But it’s also awesome to see the origin behind that, the history and how she developed

And also how the city developed and how Goodnight’s visions of what super heroes and super villains should be and the whole wonderful underpinning of this series – that super heroing can be fun. That there should be rules, code of conduct, rules of engagement. That when super powerful beings clash there needs to be some rules or everyone suffers

And it wasn’t just abstract – there was a really excellent metaplot on the consequences of, for example, heroes and villains targeting revealed identities, homes, families: how it not only gives heroes and villains downtime but how someone’s family being targeted makes them more and more desperate and more and more dangerous. And dangerous + super powers = terrible consequences.

Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have Henchmen (Please Don't Tell My Parents #3) by Richard Roberts

Penny’s career as a supervillain is in jeopardy with parental interference – but there’s a more complex battle happening at school. More and more of Penny’s contemporaries are deciding to be open with their super powers. A club is formed – and of course Penny is picked to lead it

But this points to a whole cultural shift for the city as people are now wearing their powers openly, the more alien super-powered beings are now able to be join the community and it comes with a whole lot of more complex questions: like who these kids want to be and what it actually means to be a super powered being

This book seems to be covering a lot more serious issues than the previous two – it has grown up a bit from the previous incarnations of the story.

When Penny started to gather a huge fanclub following of fellow superhero kids at school, I wondered if the Infernal Machine was going to become an army.

But, it was deeper than that. It instead used all of these kids to ask a lot of difficult questions and broaden the world beyond being just a zany setting of hilarious, almost comical superhero/villain fights

Like what goes into the choice of whether to become a superhero or a supervillain? Which do these kids want to be? Why? It may seem simple but then we see Marcia, poor, tortured, ill Marcia who speaks out of the perfection and repression that comes with heroism. We see kids who have powers that aren’t pretty and just don’t fit neatly into hero themes – including heroes rejecting their superpowered kids because their powers are “thematically” wrong

And what about those kids who do have super powers that just don’t lend themselves to combat? Not ever super power is actually an ideal battle ability. Nor is every altered form ideal for fighting – the kid who looks like they’re made of living glass may be intimidating and kind of awesome, but they’re also waaay too brittle to be involved in combat. In between the super powered fighting, the kids learning to use their powers, the kids all learning the rules of the world they’re in there’s a lot of looking at what it really means to be a super powered kid.

Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon (Please Don't Tell My Parents #2) by Richard Roberts

Penny, Claire and Ray are back from their supervillained shenanigans over the holidays and they are now back at school.

And they are bored. So very bored.

So when a supervillain offers them the chance to explore space and visit the moons of Jupiter, of course they jump at the chance!

Robots, alien goo, warring factions, oppressive automatons, and so much more – Penny and her friends are deeply involved in all of it.

Penny and her minions in the Infernal Machine are back – and I have been looking forward to this one.

This book takes the story to a completely different world – literally. The supervillains go into space using Penny’s magnificent inventions to explore new world and discover a really wide cast of characters and factions around Jupiter’s Moons

The world here is really impressive in its complexities. We have so many different factions with a range of different plots and motivations and agendas which don’t always work together. Each society/faction is very different and there’s a lot of storyline elements from each one – as well as characters who either cross the line between the different factions or draw upon lines from different faction – and even have motivations simply above and beyond their factions. I like that in particular because it’s always tempting just to make characters little avatars of the factions they represent.

Absolutely nothing about this is simple. Even the hallucinating space goat. No, really.

There’s also some really interesting interaction between Penny and another super-powered being she finds there, Remmy. I like how Penny has been established as powerful and special – but she still has peers and equals. I like the complexity of their relationship with reasonable misunderstandings, competition, friendship, jealousy and just a lot of very real emotion as well as some very pointed lessons about underestimating people and assuming their own super capabilities

If I have a complaint it’s because this book is TOO complex. Too many factions, too many people, too many separate agendas – and all of it completely introduced at once while the gang try to learn it all and wallow in the middle of it while pushing a storyline. And I wasn’t even sure what the storyline was. What were the Infernal Machine doing? What was their actual agenda there? I honestly didn’t know and I did feel kind of lost and confused more than once as I tried to remember who all these people where and, ultimately, why the Infernal Machine should care. In some ways they felt like a clumsy insert causing a lot of problems as they plunged into a situation they knew little about

Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Super Villain by Richard Roberts

Penny Ackk, daughter of super heroes Brian Akk and The Audit has been desperate for her super powers to finally kick in – and when they did they came in with a vengeance!

Of course, her dad thinks it’ll be years before they fully develop. So keeping them secret and then springing them on him as a surprise sounds likes a great idea. Until a little problem at the school science fair means she and her best friends kind of become Super Villains.

Ooops

And trying to change sides just digs them deeper in the villain put. And maintaining a secret identity when your parents are super geniuses isn’t easy anyway

But one thing no-one expected was how good they’d be at supervillainy – or how much fun it is!

This book is so much fun! I can’t remember the last time I had so much amazing fun reading a book! I literally spent my entire time reading this book with a big, silly grim on my face, broken only when I had to laugh.

It’s campy, it’s a little silly, but it’s so incredibly fun! Super heroes and super villains duking it out in the street – oh not your dark and gritty super villains who have become so popular. Far less stylish than that! These are fun super villains and super heroes – with the super heroes (perhaps) taking things pretty seriously but recognising limits and the villains are just enjoying themselves immensely. Yes, sometimes a villain takes it too far – but then their fellow villains will quietly feed them to the more extreme heroes (and then they “accidentally don’t survive a fight”). I love this sense of everyone having fun so long as everyone knows the rules, kind of, even though no-one’s ever going to expressly state it.

But, hey, there are RULES. Like you totally don’t hit people’s families or their secret lairs. That would be cheating!

I love the fact that even though they are supervillains they cling to the hope they can change sides whenever they find a suitably dramatic moment. And yes, of course it has to be dramatic – how else are they going to make sure they have an awesome backstory? Switching sides from evil to good can make for an awesome origin story, they just need the right moment. Lucyfar changes sides on a completely random basis! (Perhaps best summed up with, when they betray some fellow villains they meet a response of “you kids are awesome!”)

Did I mention it was so much fun?