I'm a bit torn on this one. I read it because I've liked a lot of Anderson's other work, though I'm only familiar with the basics of the Superman story. Mostly it was an easy read, fun if fairly shallow and tending by necessity to disaster porn. That said, to me the most interesting character by far was the younger brother, Zor-El, and I would have preferred more on him and less on his cripplingly naive (and frequently outstandingly stupid) brother.

The thing that solidified this as a two star for me was that old saw: in fantasy/sci-fi, everything changes but the status of women. Granted, this is based on an existing universe that was first created decades ago so perhaps Anderson is working off a fairly rigid set of characters, but for goodness sake. It's an advanced world - no poverty, little crime... and bar one token exception who's very soon killed off, there appear to be no women in government, or in any other position of power (military, scientific, etc...) for that matter. And when that government's gone, the replacement - formulated specifically in reaction to the old hidebound system - still has no women. I see a lot of younger brothers whining that it's their turn now, but apparently sisters (both older and younger) are essentially irrelevant. And then when that government's overthrown and a new council installed... still no women, and no indication, from text or author, that this is in any way strange.

Now you might say: but there are women! And they have large roles to play! And it's true, but those three roles are supporting in all senses of the word. Aethyr, who wants to explore and lose the shackles of social expectation, finds a great, lost city and promptly hands it and all its contents over to her lover so that he can decide what to do with it. Zor-El's wife Alura is supposedly a great healer/botanist, but all we see of her work is her nursing her husband and bandaging his scrapes. And the main female character, Lara, is an artist by trade - and the high point of her admittedly truncated artistic career is a portrait of her husband as the personification of genius. I'm just saying, a competent female character not defined by her relationship to the man she's there to prop up would have been very welcome. If the source material doesn't have one, spend less time on the endless series of disasters and add one.

I know that Kal-El survives. I hope that Zor-El does too. The rest of them I just don't care that much about.