Credit where it's due: for a couple of hours, Jason Reynolds has actually made me give a damn about Spiderman, which is something no-one else has ever been able to accomplish. Words cannot relate how very little I care about Spiderman. "Why are you reading a book about him then?" you ask, and it's a sensible question. I have been slowly reading my way through a Goodreads list of speculative fiction written by black authors, in an attempt to actively widen my reading choices, and I admit: when I saw this on it I groaned. But the library had it, and so (with very little enthusiasm) I borrowed it from them. And you know what? I'm glad I did.

For one brief, shining moment, I actually cared about Spiderman. It will probably never happen again, not unless Reynolds writes another book about him anyway, but it happened once and that's miracle enough. I think what really appealed to me here was how very little this book was actually about Spiderman. Which sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Most of the storyline here was about family and racism in schools and navigating poverty, and these are all subjects that I find much, much more engrossing than I do razor-tailed cats and weird-arse cults and spiderwebs shooting out from people's bodies. And there was a bit of that, but not a lot of it. I mean really not a lot of it. I know that superhero stories are often metaphors and that the better ones do have this focus on the human story as well as the superhero one, but the balance of the two, for me, is all too frequently skewed more towards the superhero side of things than I would prefer.

So I enjoyed this, and as a bonus, the library has another book by Reynolds in it (the non-fiction Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You, co-written with Ibram X. Kendi) so I'm going to get that out when I take this back today, because I like the way that Reynolds writes and I want to read more of it.