Synopsis: Colin is alone, cut off from Sakkara since their decision to reemploy the treacherous Max Dalton. Danny and Renata are struggling to discover the true motives of their masters at Sakkara, whose increasingly strict and military hierarchy is starting to grate. While the heroes are separated, the plans of the villainous Victor Cross are coming together beautifully. The Trutopians have been forged into a world power, he is confident that he can bring Colin into the fold, and the New Heroes are on the brink of collapse. Is this the dawn of the new age of superheroes? Or is it the end of everything? 

 Review: Michael Carroll’s New Heroes series is a sophisticated tale of superheroes and, unlike many of the classic superhero tales it paints a universe in which the deeds of superheroes are not only incredible, but have real and far-reaching consequences. The world around them does not carry on regardless, with only one crashed train more or less to speak of the existence of superhuman involvement. The military and the media between them transform the New Heroes into something beyond superhuman, making them symbols and catalysts for world events.

In this final volume, Danny, Renata and their ‘normal’ friend Razor confront the powers that would control them, while Colin falls under a different influence, before succumbing to a less subtle form of mind-control. By their actions, they bring the world to the point of destruction, and it is by no means certain that they will – or even, at the end, that they have – bring it all the way back from that brink.

As in previous volumes, and especially in Sakkara, one of the most notable features of the novel is the lauding above all of the aptly-named Paragon. Solomon Cord is held up by many of the characters as the epitome of heroism, despite the fact that he was never a superhuman. That it is not Colin’s ex-superhuman father, but Cord’s utterly ‘normal’ daughter who is able to take on the mantle and become a true hero is no coincidence, nor is it a simple matter of inheritance. Throughout this book it is ordinary people – Stephanie Cord, Razor, even a hapless wannabe hero who falls under Stephanie’s protection – who are held up as the best and the brightest, even as the war of the superhumans goes on around them.

The New Heroes must remain the superhero series of choice for the sophisticated young reader, bringing many disparate and literary elements to the much-maligned and often ill-served genre.

2007-04-28