By Catherine Cheek
When Daniel Corrigan moves to Noble’s Green, he quickly finds out why it’s called “the safest town on earth.” Some of his new friends in this town have superpowers. But Daniel’s new friends are afraid. When a kid with superpowers turns thirteen, his powers—and his memory of ever having them—disappear. While the novel is written for a younger audience, older readers will also empathize with the tragedy of having your friends grow up, stop being cool and forget you overnight.
The focus of this novel is not in the kids’ heroism. For instance, when Eric saves someone whose car falls in a river, the scene occurs off stage. Daniel only finds out by putting the clue of wet and muddy Eric together with the story of a mysterious hero on the news. Although Daniel knows his friends save people, he doesn’t view them as heroes but as fellow students. The superpowered kids fill roles familiar to this genre: Eric is the golden boy. Clay is the school’s bully and Bud (who has a hilariously useless super power) is Clay’s sidekick. Mollie is the tomboy next door who becomes Daniel’s closest friend. Louisa is the sweet one, who has a crush on Daniel (and makes him uncomfortable with her “girl-ness.”) Rohan is the brainy nerd of the group.
Daniel represents everyone who’s ever known what it’s like to be weak and vulnerable among people who seem to be able to do anything–that is, what it’s like to be a twelve-year-old kid. In one scene, his friends smell smoke and decide there’s a fire to put out, and they ask Daniel to help by watching kid sister Rose.
Eric looked pleadingly at Daniel. What else was Daniel going to do? He wouldn’t be any help putting out a fire, anyway, He’d probably just get in the way.
“Yeah, of course,” he answered. “You guys just get going . Rose’ll be fine with me.”
…As the Supers disappeared past the trees, Daniel felt his earlier euphoria disappear along with them. He might be good at games but when it came to real heroics, he was useless. At times like this he was, at best, a convenient babysitter.
In many novels written with young protagonists, the parents are either absent or grotesquely incompetent. After all, it’s hard for a hero to save the day if his parents attend too closely to his moves. Although the kids have a level of freedom that seems criminally negligent by today’s paranoid standards, Daniel’s parents are plausibly preoccupied by his Gran’s illness. And after all, the problems which Daniel and his friends face are only of importance to them. They keep their powers secret from adults, and when they lose their powers, they just become normal kids again. With one exception, all the adults who knew anything about superpowers had their memories wiped at age thirteen.
Daniel struggles to deal with the typical travails of youth: bullies and mean teachers and worry about his ailing grandmother. He also struggles with envy. But to his new friends, his powerlessness is an asset. Because Daniel has no superpowers to lose, he’s the perfect one to find out what makes the kids turn normal when they turn thirteen. Daniel isn’t as strong or as gifted as any of his new friends, even the five-year-old Rosie, but he is brave and clever. He’s willing to do what it takes to find out how to stop them from losing what makes them special.
He suspects that the answer has something to do with a comic book hero named Johnny Noble who may or may not be based on a man of the same name that the town is named after. The powers may have come from a reoccurring meteor shower, or from the mountain itself, or from a singular event having to do with a group of orphans at St. Albans’ who were rescued by the real Johnny Noble.
The super powered kids have been warned against visiting the North Face and the Old Quarry, so naturally that is where they search. Daniel learns the North Face is haunted, and that bad things have happened there for many centuries. This is where some of the facts didn’t connect well enough for me. The connection with a meteor shower left me confused. The plot inconsistencies didn’t slow down the action, but after finishing the novel I realized I still didn’t understand when and what had happened, or why only children got powers in the first place.
However, the characters don’t seem too concerned about the origins of their powers, only in stopping the antagonist bent on removing them. The latter half of the book deals with Daniel trying to discover the real antagonist and his motivations. Astute readers will see it coming a mile away, but I figured it out only a couple of pages before Daniel did, and I got some of it wrong.
In true super-villain fashion, the antagonist (who I will avoid naming for spoiler reasons), tells Daniel the origin of Johnny Noble and the original superhero kids, and his own origin as well. He sees a kinship in Daniel, and tries to recruit him. Instead of just wringing his hands and laughing at the sky, he reveals a valid reason to remove the super powers from Daniel’s friends. Although the rest of the novel adheres closely to its pulpy comic-book feel, the antagonist’s motive is morally ambiguous. In a refreshing twist, Daniel, and the reader, are left wondering if maybe the bad guy had the right idea all along.
Powerless doesn’t have the horrifying darkness that many young adult novels have these days, so even squeamish adults and sensitive younger readers won’t have nightmares. There’s no sex, only one swear word, and it’s action-packed without being overly violent. If you’re a middle-school student or a thirty-year-old kid who likes superheroes, Powerless is a fun read.
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