booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Bruce and Madeleine have a strange relationship. It's complicated because she's a prisoner and he's a billionaire temporarily doing community service on her floor. I like their dynamic, it fits the playboy trajectory that is implicit for this character, where he wants someone who will run circles around him like Madeleine does. 

This references enough subtle touchstones for the general run of Batman stories to feel grounded in that world while also establishing the rules of this one, where he's not Batman, he's just Bruce, and he's still a kid. It plays off of the huge inequities in Gotham City (even in just the existence of so many ultra-rich people available to be targeted by the Nightwalkers with seemingly little effort). It nods to things like the Batmobile and the Batsuit by having him being in a very fancy car and wear a suit (but not that suit) at one point.

The plot of what actually happens on the page makes a bunch of sense and I like it a lot. However, the justifications for why the major players are where they are and are doing what they're doing... that was very fuzzy and had a bunch of switch-ups as Madeleine is Bruce's main source for most of that backstory. She's canonically a liar but hard to know which specific things were lies at any one time, and I'm loath to just believe whichever story was in play when the narrative stopped moving. The ending mostly pulls it together and includes additional nods for things in the Batman canon.