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In Strictly No Heroics, a normal teen girl must navigate crushing on her best friend, starting a new summer job, and not being squashed during the next supervillain showdown in B.L. Radley's young adult debut filled with humor and heart.
A Normie's guide to staying alive in Sunnylake City:
The world is run by those with the Super gene, and Riley Jones doesn't have it. She's just a Normie, ducking her way around the hero vs. villain battles that constantly demolish Sunnylake City, working at a crappy diner to save up money for therapy, and trying to figure out how to tell her family that she's queer. But when Riley retaliates against a handsy superhero at work, she finds herself in desperate need of employment, and the only place that will hire her is HENCH.
Yes, HENCH, as in henchmen: masked cronies who take villains' coffee orders, vacuum their secret lairs, and posture in the background while they fight. Riley's plan is to mind her own business and get paid...but that quickly devolves when she witnesses a horrible murder on the job. Caught in the thick of a gentrification plot, a unionization effort, and a developing crush on her prickly fellow henchwoman, Riley must face the possibility that even a powerless Normie can take a stand against injustice.
"Radley subverts classic comic book tropes to craft an imaginative futuristic setting grounded in realistic interpersonal challenges. In this engaging and provocative telling, Radley skillfully explores power and privilege from both human and superhuman angles." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Radley explores how it feels to be the little guy through the allegorical lens of superpowers: Superemacist ideology has many parallels readers will recognize from the real world, and the setting doesn't come across as a fictional dystopia due to this grounding in social issues. Riley's journey in this world populated with queer and racially diverse characters is both thrilling and galvanizing. A call to action as much as a piece of entertaining fiction." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Strictly No Heroics was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
B. L. Radley wanted to be an astronaut or a penguin when they grew up. Neither worked out. Thankfully, fiction lets them live vicariously as both. Raised in rural England alongside several tame chickens and one feral brother, Radley still lives in the countryside, along with nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine story ideas, enough books to count as a fire hazard, and the occasional Oxford Comma. Strictly No Heroics is their debut novel.
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