What happens when the "super heroes" and "arch villains" step back from their battles and ask "what am I doing?"  Who is damaged in the fall out of the crimes the heroes stop?  Are they actually making the world a better place?

For years, teenaged Alison Green fought crime as Mega Girl. Super speed and strength, flying, and impervious to damage.  Then a villain showed her a possible conspiracy, eliminating the nascent "biodynamics" with powers to literally make the world a better place, while leaving others.  How does the ability to beat up a giant robot matter in the larger scheme of things?  Alison is now trying to learn who she is beyond a "super hero," try to find a way to actually make the world a better place, and to figure out what it means to do the right thing.

strongfemaleprotagonist.com

Strong Female Protagonist started out as a webcomic, and recently the artists published the first volume of the story.

I now have another webcomic added to my reading list.

Strong Female Protagonist tells a fantastic story, exploring not just Alison's efforts to understand her place in the world, but socio-political issues we face every day.  She must learn to look at issues as more than black and white, deal with fear of what she is, and callous or fearful inaction of normal life.

Advanced Reader Copy copy courtesy of Netgalley; differences may exist between uncorrected galley text and the final edition.

Received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let's just say this book was horrendous. I will just write a few sentences about the book, because a good or bad isn't going to work, since I can't really think of anything positive.

Throughout the book I was experiencing lots of WTF and WTH. I at times had no clue what happened. I mean, our main girl just walks in the middle of the street, gets thrown by bus and the bus stop sign just bend through. That was the first time I had no clue what had happened. Sure I read the description, but come on I was expecting at least a bit of background before getting thrown in the world of stopping with superheroism. So I was like: OMG that girl just got killed by a bus!!!!!!!!!!!!! And then find out she was unharmed, not even a scratch, just a poor bend bus stop sign. I was utterly confused and wanted to close the book then.

But I continued bravely, and I kind of wish I just dropped the book and wrote a review about the book then.

I will rant about the story and how confusing and at times boring it was in a bit. First up, the art and the text bubbles. Because, I am sure it might look good in bookformat, but it just doesn't work out in pdf/epub/cbr. At times I just couldn't read the text, at other times I had to squint and hurt my head reading stuff. The art is a bit fuzzy too, like someone erased some stuff, edited something in and erased some more. This might be that they converted it crappy, but I am deducting points for this. I need to be able to read a book, and also need to like the art. In graphic novels these are two of the biggest things I look at.

Now we have several plotlines and I think it would just be good to have stayed with one. We have Mega Girl + her trying to actually do something without her superpowers, we have the whole Feral part, we have her boyfriend who is/was actually a bad villain part, we got several other things happening and sorry, just stick with one plot. Especially in your first book. Don't throw it all at me, especially without much of a backstory. For most, I didn't feel anything for the characters. I was just confused, and I didn't really see why it was so much trouble to stop with superhero stuff.

And then that Feral stuff and how that escalated (again, because seriously this is not the first time). *sighs*

Mega Girl, or Allison, I just found her pathetic. I didn't like her. At times she would all be like: Sorry, Sorry, sorry for whatever the fuck I did, and then come back with lines that she wants to kill everyone, that she fantasizes about killing people... all the effing time? Wait what? Sorry, but every time she would do this, and also all the sorry crap I only started disliking her more and more, up to the point that I just didn't want to continue.

I will be honest, at around 100 of the 223 pages of my epub/pdf, I just want to quit, I wanted to stop reading this, and I continued, continued to see if maybe, just maybe it would get better. Sadly it didn't. Every time I would look at the page number, and see I only read a few pages instead of the big number I was expecting. I really had to drag/force myself through it.

I would say my favourite chapter would be the last one, that one FINALLY explains about Allison and her superpowers and how she got them and such. FINALLY.

And then it suddenly just stops. Yeah, if you want to read more about Allison, just pop over to our website. Um, no. Nice and anti-climatic to end a book like that. Definitely minus-points.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend this book.

Review first posted at http://twirlingbookprincess.com/

Part of today's #AmReading from Strong Female Protagonist, a web comic by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag, Issue 5, P17