Hours of my life I will never get back

As a longtime criminal armed with superpowers and supersmarts, Tori Rivas is used to breaking the rules to get what she wants. But when her latest heist ends in capture, she’s forced to work for a group of elite villains. But for a group of supposed rule-breakers, the villains have a pretty strict code. So if Tori wants to stay alive, she’ll have to learn to play by the rules…for the most part.

I really wanted to like this book. The superhero premise sounded like fun, and the idea of a league of super villains seemed exciting. Unfortunately, the story itself was bland and overdone. The characters were trite and the plot dragged on.

Why is the main character so boring?

I will admit, there were a few interesting characters in the bunch: Tori’s mentor, Ivan, the reformed super villain turned super dad; Tori’s coworker, Donald, a videogame nerd who has to put his newfound powers to the test in the real world;  Sadly, the main character was the blandest character in the story. She’s a superhero prodigy (because of course she is) who excels at both fighting and inventing.

Tori’s biggest flaws are (supposedly) that she doesn’t work well with people and that she can’t play by the rules. Now, those are great flaws. The only issue is that despite stating in narration that these are Tori’s flaws, Tori never actually acts on them. Tori has trouble following the villain code? At the very beginning of the story, Ivan explains to her why it’s important and that if she breaks the code she’ll be killed. And for the rest of the story, Tori follows the rules without any problems! She never runs into any issues from her supposed “rule breaking” tendencies, and she has no problem keeping the villain code. As for her reluctance to ask for help or work in a team? She also immediately overcomes these issues with no problems: she asks her coworker for help filling out paperwork and she encourages her fellow villain apprentices to work together in order to overcome a major challenge. That doesn’t sound like someone who has trouble being a team player to me.

To be effective, characters’ flaws have to impact their lives and relationships, often negatively. Otherwise, they’re just superficial. Tori’s quick “overcoming” of her flaws felt trite and unrealistic and ultimately made her uninteresting as a character. Tori’s character fell into the trap of having her only (true) flaw being the boring “caring about her friends too much.”

Tori’s relationship with Ivan, her mentor, was interesting, but for me it only served to showcase how much more interesting the story would be if it were about anyone BUT Tori. Also, their relationship felt like a cheap rip off of the relationship between Nimona and Blackheart from Nimona by ND Stevenson, but without any of the actual tension that comes from an apprentice pushing back against a mentor. Unlike the tension we see between Nimona and Blackheart (from Nimona’s desire to destroy everything and Blackheart’s desire to destroy only what is necessary), Ivan and Tori don’t ever really clash. They never have any conflicting goals, and they support each other well. While that may be great for their relationship, it makes for pretty boring reading.

A Glacial-Paced Plot

The story itself drags on a bit. I truly think this story needed an editor to cut about a third of it—the fight scenes start to get repetitive and don’t do anything to advance the plot. I found myself skimming to get to parts that were actually interesting (spoiler alert: I was skimming for a long time).

A major plot point comes from conflict between the heroes and the villains. The heroes focus on flashy propaganda while the villains take care of the real criminals from the sidelines. I was looking forward to seeing shades of gray in the villains, but they were honestly all…morally upright. Unnaturally morally upright. I think I was hoping to see something more like the villains from Renegades by Marissa Meyer. In Renegades, we understand why the villains are villains, and we see both their good and evil actions, which forces us to juggle the contradictions between their evilness and their goodness. But the villains in Forging Hephaestus are just…good. There’s no shades of gray in the characters, which makes them feel pretty one-dimensional.

Does the book have any redeeming qualities?

I mean… not really. The prose is meh, the dialogue is occasionally cringey, and the plotlines are all rehashed. Still, I did start the second book, so I guess I wasn’t completely thrown off by all the negatives? Maybe I was hoping that things would get better after the first book (spoiler alert: things do not get better). 

But I guess if you’re desperate for more books in the superhero genre, and you don’t mind skipping pages of mindless fluff, you could give it a go. But please don’t blame me for the hours of your life you will never be able to get back.