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Synopsis:

Danny Tozer has a problem: she just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world’s greatest superhero.

Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she’s transgender. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those secondhand superpowers transformed Danny’s body into what she’s always thought it should be. Now there’s no hiding that she’s a girl. 

It should be the happiest time of her life, but Danny’s first weeks finally living in a body that fits her are more difficult and complicated than she could have imagined. Between her father’s dangerous obsession with “curing” her girlhood, her best friend suddenly acting like he’s entitled to date her, and her fellow superheroes arguing over her place in their ranks, Danny feels like she’s in over her head.

She doesn’t have much time to adjust. Dreadnought’s murderer—a cyborg named Utopia—still haunts the streets of New Port City, threatening destruction. If Danny can’t sort through the confusion of coming out, master her powers, and stop Utopia in time, humanity faces extinction.

Review:

Danny lives in a world with superheroes, but she never thought that she would meet the most famous superhero of them all, Dreadnought, let alone under such conditions. One day as Danny is out in the city, she witnesses Dreadnought fighting a supervillain, Utopia—and the powerful Dreadnought ends up fatally wounded. Before he dies, he transfers his mantle to Danny, giving her his powers.

To Danny’s astonishment and elation, Dreadnought’s powers do something they’ve never been known to before, transforming her body into the one she has always wanted—that of a girl’s. All her life Danny has hidden that she is transgender, but now it’s out for the world to see, and just because she’s happy with it doesn’t mean that others are. Danny must face the reactions of those around her, especially that of her father, who is intent on getting her body turned back into that of a boy’s.

On top of it all, the supervillain who killed Dreadnought seems to be planning something, and with her newly gained powers Danny must figure out what is going on and stop it before it’s too late… or else.

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Danny is a character who has so much on her 15-year-old shoulders, and I’d say that this book was more character driven than what I assumed it would be like. It still had that superhero action, but it could also be described as a coming of age story where Danny needs to learn to accept herself and learn her worth. As a transgender girl, Danny not only deals with transphobia, but with the sometimes unpleasant experiences that come with having a girl’s body. Her parents make her struggle no easier, and her father in particular adds to her stress by his outright denial to accept her as the girl she is. Throughout the book, you see her struggle to overcome the deprecation of herself that she internalized due to her father’s treatment.

She comes across often as quite an angry character, but anyone who stops to look at Danny’s situation will understand that her anger is justified, and that often, beneath it all, she is really scared and lost.

With so much for her to process, I was glad to see Danny’s growing friendship with Calamity. Calamity is a gray cape—one of the people with abilities who are neither villains (black capes) nor heroes (white capes). She becomes Danny’s companion as they work together towards discovering Utopia’s motives and plans. Their relationship wasn’t perfect, but that’s what I also loved about it, because no friendships are instantly perfect.

I also liked that this book showed the gray that can still exist even if you are a superhero, for not only can superheroes not save everyone, but their characters may be flawed, and it is not easy to tell right from wrong. The superheroes living in the city were not without their shortcomings, and in fact, I found one of the members quite villainous as she refused to call Danny by her preferred name and pronouns. (But I really liked Doc Impossible, the scientist!)

There was also diversity! It’s an #ownvoices book, as the author is a transgender woman, and some of the diversity in the book includes a lesbian character and a Latinx character (Calamity).

However, I did find the book repetitive at times, as some points in Danny’s thoughts were repeated too much when I had already grasped their meaning. There was also something about the pacing of the story that didn’t draw me along as it should have, so until the last chunk of the book, there were times when I found it too slow. Compared to it’s positive things, though, this was still a great debut novel and I will be continuing to read the series!

Trigger warnings: transphobia, homophobia, related slurs, verbal abuse

Have you read Dreadnought, or are you planning to? What are your thoughts?